


Une Terreur Douce et Amère

by Danae14



Series: Any Fool Can Be Happy [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kidnapping, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Self-Hatred, Team as Family, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26766589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Danae14/pseuds/Danae14
Summary: A Sweet and Bitter Terror"Usually people start these sort of things with a name. A name humanizes something. We name pets to show our attachment. We exchange names to become familiar with one another. We name children to show possession and care. It grows our empathy for something. I neither want nor deserve your empathy but my name none the less is Sébastien Lelivre."Booker and Quynh trying to figure out each other, their trauma, and their new place in the world. You do not have to have read the first fic to read this one.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Booker | Sebastien le Livre's Wife, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Any Fool Can Be Happy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950838
Comments: 98
Kudos: 73





	1. Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité

**Author's Note:**

> This one does not have a lot to do with the first fic in the series, besides the fact that Nicky and Joe are in both. You do not have to have read Deus Vult to read this one. This fic is movie compliant but not comic. I do not speak French, so please excuse the google translate.

“Have you ever fucked up so bad, like so monumentally terribly, that you can’t quite connect the dots of reality? Watching the team walk away from me after my 100 year sentence was like getting a bucket of water dumped over my head and waking up for the first time in over two hundred years. I’d been aware, conscious, sane, definitely not sober but there through all of my terrible decisions this past year but none of them had felt real. I hadn’t connected with reality in such a terribly long time that while a part of me was screaming as I sold my friend’s freedom to Merrick, the rest felt nothing at all. No that’s not right, I didn’t even make any money, I gave it away. I profited nothing and lost everything. None of it had truly connected for me though. I had watched himself, helpless, knowing what a mistake it was. Not even the lies Copley and I had told ourselves had been enough to truly convince me. That ridiculous quote from that movie that Joe loved echoing in my head “The greater good*,” a mockery in my own ears. The horrendously delusional justification for evil decisions. That’s the problem with death not being a consequence, there truly didn’t feel like there were any consequences at that point. So I could tell my screaming conscience to go back to sleep and drown it with alcohol. It didn’t matter if we all got locked up for a while, we’d be fine. They’d figure us out, save some lives along the way, and I would finally have my blessed release from this horrendous dark comedy. But when Andy had gone down and not gotten back up again, all of my carefully crafted plans had fallen into ash. As she had writhed on the ground and spat her betrayal and hatred at me, that had been real. This was a consequence. This mattered but I’d already fucked up so horrendously at that point, it was too late. So as I stood on the dock watching my team, my family disappear up the stairs without me at their backs, I felt for the first time since my first death. I felt the cold wind through my clothes, I could smell the river on the air, I could taste the salt of my tears. I hadn’t even realized I was crying until then. This was real and I truly understood how fucked I was.  
So what does a mourning, lonely immortal so broken with guilt he couldn’t even look in the mirror, do with a hundred year banishment. Join the peace corps? Get a dog? Jump off the London Bridge with a block of cement tied to my feet? What the ever loving fuck was I suppose to do. I hadn’t been making decisions for myself in such a long time. The group made decisions together or Andy made them for us. But how can you understand what I did next without knowing how it all began.

Sorry I’ve gone and gotten ahead of myself. Usually people start these sort of things with a name. A name humanizes something. We name pets to show our attachment. We exchange names to become familiar with one another. We name children to show possession and care. It grows our empathy for something. I neither want nor deserve your empathy but my name none the less is Sébastien Lelivre. So what’s in a name? Not only does a name do something socially for us, it also tells us something about the person. The country of origin, the age from which they were born, perhaps a religion, or value system. Now consider for a moment a man born in a time with no last name, known only as either son of or the job that you do. Then one day some great ponce comes on the scene and declares in his brilliant imperial way that all people must now be known with a familial name, as well as a given one, for society you see. So now no longer is someone Francis son of John or Enzo the butcher. Now we are Francis Johnson, or Enzo Butcher and then all of his descendants would be named accordingly, despite not having a father named John or never having been a butcher. I was one such man. Given the opportunity to name my family. Having my formative years being the height of the enlightenment and the revolutionary years, the pundit that I was, I choose Le Livre, the book. 

Which book you may ask but I haven’t the answer. Certainly wasn’t the ‘Good Book’. I’d grown up Catholic or course, like all good frenchmen of my age but firmly crossed that off my list in college. Well if not religion then maybe poetry, something like les Jardins or Élégies but poetry was never my muse. Perhaps then you may think it would have been one of influential philosophical writers of the time. Maybe Locke, Voltaire, Bayle, or Fontenelle but you’d be wrong again. It wasn’t about any particular book. It was more about the concept of a book, what a book represented during that time. I was a young man when the revolution began, a university student, right at the heart of it all. We fed ourselves on the ideals of equality, brotherhood, and liberty. Reading the lauded books of enlightenment gave us feelings of superiority, power, and choice, things that our father’s never dreamed of. They were slaves to the social structures of their times. Church, taxes, guilds, or lords, all took their toll and left the populace broke, starved, and helpless. To borrow from Marx, “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".  
Books opened up the scope of the universe for us. They gave us understanding, free will, and value.  
It was during that time that I started my career of forging. At first it was something that offered aid to the cause. After the revolution it became less poetic and more of a necessity. You see while my mind was busy being stimulated by ideals of the day, my heart had found another thing to engross my time. 

Amélie was my spitfire. The daughter of one of my professors. She was nothing like any other woman I had ever met. She wasn't particularly beautiful, though not plain by any means. With wide hips, mousy brown hair, and a pretty face, she had the most remarkable eyes. Turquoise like ice in their fury, warm as azure in their passion, and seafoam green when she got in that particular mood that nothing was going to stand in her way or tell her no. To me, she was the most exquisite woman I had ever met. She read more than most boys in the university and would argue with such vehemence and passion as a spitting cat. No-one lauded the ideals more than she did. She was exacting and particular about the way things should be. Religion was not the way it ought to be, it was meant to be a comfort to people and a resource for the vulnerable. Education was not the way it ought to be. It should be universal and affordable. Government was not the way it ought to be, it was meant to be for all people and without corruption. When I had suggested the family name to her years later in our little kitchen one night, she had laughed and called me a conceited bastard before kissing me sweetly.  
So with Amélie by my side we joined in the preparation for the great revolution. Not caring if we lived or died, only caring about our righteous cause. We helped create and distribute pamphlets, attended secret meetings, and gathered what information we could. Amélie was a splendid spy. Her uncle had recently bought a title of nobility being a rich textile merchant. Amélie would hobnob with the best of them, pulling tidbits of information back with her from her visits. She was a kind thing, and was horrified by the carnage our ideals lead to. She lost her uncle in the madness of the reign of terror and was never quite the same after. Miracle of miracles we both survived, with a few close calls, and the first of our sons, Olivier, was born. With him came responsibility. No longer could we carelessly throw ourselves as martyrs onto the pyre of our beliefs. The revolution had dissolved into such a state of wanton destruction and horror that we no longer wanted to be a part of it any more. We set ourselves up for family life. Bought a little house, it was easy to find an empty one and cheap. Off I went to find a job, life had to continue you see, even as people were daily being pulled from their houses and set upon the dais for all to witness the guillotine do it’s evil purpose. It was easy for me to justify at times. Of course they deserved it, they schemed and plotted, turning their countrymen into sheep. They had hoarded their riches like dragons while the common man paid so much taxes his children starved in their beds. Other times, when it was people we knew were good to the poor or folk who had supported change but not the violence, those deaths became increasingly more difficult to justify. Work was surprisingly difficult to find. What did the world need with an educated man? I wasn’t skilled, didn’t know how to build, bake, or butcher. I had been a student of philosophy and political science. Politics seemed a bad idea to get into at the moment. So I fell back on my revolutionary skill, forgery. Only now it wasn’t as lauded by my peers.  
The people who needed the forgeries were people who needed to hide or flee from the new french government. They paid handsomely. Then there was the Assignat, the new french paper money. Our royal bank had gotten us into so much debt that when the new government tried to mitigate the damages they ended up printing new money and lots of it. The idiots should have accounted for inflation. At first the economy boomed, but as more and more money was printed, the less it had value. I made a good living in the beginning by printing my own forgeries of the Assignat. So I forged for a different reason than before, less noble to an idealistic school boy but as a man with a family, I didn’t care about those things anymore. I cared only that my wife and my sons didn’t starve.  
After a time the killings stopped, or at least lessened. Olivier was joined by Marius, Phillippe, and finally little Jean-Pierre, named for his deceased great uncle. Our household wasn’t always the happiest, it was steeped in the troubles of our age. Fear of violence, starvation, worry about the future. I was forced into long hours of work. Forgery was dangerous and after the initial boom not very profitable. I was caught somewhere near the beginning. It was because of some of the connections I still kept in the new french government that I only had to serve a sentence of four years. This was right after Jean-Pierre was born. When I got out, he didn’t even know who I was.  
Amélie was an angel, doting on our children and caring for the home. We had both changed in the years of the revolution. Some of our spark had gone out. We lost our optimism and our ideals. We saw how brother betrayed brother. We saw how many lost their freedom and their lives. We saw how a new world order was being built up, a new emperor for our country. We felt used, discarded, and bitter. We had wanted to remake the world into something shiny and new but it ended up being remade in the image of the old. We loved each other and we loved our boys but a deep dissatisfaction with the world had gripped our hearts. We felt disillusioned and betrayed. Then one day the life we had built came crashing down on top of us. 

Napoleon was the rising star of the day, the saviour of France, coming to redeem her and bring her into the new era. Modernity, civilization, institutions, and a return to law. A law that looked unkindly on my chosen profession. My oldest son was already old enough to be engaged and the younger three were close behind. I had grown complacent and bored. Ultimately it would be a book that would be my undoing. Some old crotchety son of someone asked me to forge his books, to help it look like he was paying the taxes he was supposed to. Well the fucker went and got himself caught, didn’t tell me the insurmountable amount of money he made on exports and how obviously he was cooking his books. Well he went and rolled on me in the end. So the choice was given. Prison or the army. My wife begged me to go to prison but I remembered the horror’s of that place. The stink, the darkness, the cold, the cruelty. Surely in the army I would at least be treated with respect and I’d get to travel. See the world.

You should know this part of the story. Russia was the worst imaginable place to march an army, mostly because the fucking Russians were, and still are, the most rediculously stubborn nation to walk this earth. The old adage of to cut off your own nose to spite your face doesn’t even come close to what a Russian is willing to do. Well cheers to them it fucking worked. The greatest european army ever, led by one of the leading minds to ever command, yet he couldn’t have predicted the lengths to which the Russians would go to to make sure we lost. Of course I ran. I was not by far the only one. Between the starvation, the bloody, brutal battles, and the cold, there was not a man there that had the stomach for the conquering anymore, let alone me who hadn’t the stomach to begin with. I just wanted to get home in time for my son’s wedding. To return to my wife’s cooking and the warmth of my household, cozy by the fire. So I ran. I got caught. I died.

And here we come to the second part of the name. Or well the first I guess. Sébastien. The one I didn't chose. Venerable, revered. What a thing to try to live up to. Name also for the martyr who did not die, stuck full of arrows like a pincushion. I woke up again. The dreams barely registered at first. You see when I woke up again, I was still bloody tied up and in the noose. Hanging is a terrible way to die, all panic and pain. When I came back for the first time, the army was still passing by. I’d had to play dead, while strangling to death, over and over again. I did the math once. You die on average in 4-6 minutes when hung by the neck and I was up there for three days before the army passed on by. I must have died, low estimate, something like 500-720 times, maybe a few less because the first few times you come back it isn’t instantaneous. When you strangle to death, your body shakes and panics, trying to get the blood to the brain. Your ears pop and your eyes bulge. It was the most horrific birth anyone has ever experienced I dare say. 

I never wanted to experience anything like that ever again but then of course you snuck on into my dreams, drowning, over and over again. Oh how I loathed you. The rest of them, they missed you. They were a wreck when they found me, even all those hundreds of years later. They barely had room for me, their hearts were so full of grief. They loved you. I had to bite my tongue when you were brought up for fear of cursing your name in their presence. I hated you more than anything I have ever hated before. I hated suffering with you, night after night, knowing there was nothing I could do to ever be free of you, unless you or I finally kicked it for good. I wasn’t a religious man. One of the only things my wife and I disagreed on. She still loved God despite hating the church and I thought it was all a waste. For years I prayed before I went to bed every night that this would be the night you finally sucked in your last excruciating mouthful of water and peacefully slipped into the great beyond. More’s the pity I never got my wish.”  
Quynh smiled, a slash of unhappy red on her lips as Booker finished his soliloquy. His hands had long since gone numb, tied in front of him. Dried blood, pooled beneath his knees and itched along his skin. Quynh leaned back in her lounge chair, taking a sip from her glass of water. The chain attaching his collar to the chair, clinking as she shifted.  
“This is all very interesting my pet but you still haven’t answered my question. Where are the others?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *the movie is called Hot Fuzz and the creepy chorus of The Greater Good will stick with you.


	2. Un Purgatoire Bien Mérité

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Well Deserved Purgatory

Chapter Two

“What was it like? When Andy found you all those years ago?”  
“Booker, we talked about this already. You need to quit trying to change the subject.”  
“Not changing the subject. Torture is just much more effective if you give me time to heal in between. The last three deaths I didn’t even feel because my nerves were still fried from when you electrocuted me to death.”  
Booker spat a gob of blood and what looked like lung onto the ground in front of him and panted, watching her expectantly. Quynh sighed heavily and put down the knife.  
“She looked like the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my life. I had given up months before she found me. I had lost everything. My family, my village, my reputation. They accused me of being a quỷ đói, a hungry spirit. A spirit who had shamed and abandoned their ancestors. I was driven out, cursed but not before they took their time making me suffer for my affliction. People I had grown up with, my uncles and cousins. No one had any pity for me.  
I thought Andromache had come to continue my punishment. She had looked so fierce but when she found me she cradled me. She gave me water, food, and shelter. It took me a few days before I finally realized that she was human like I was. It took us ages to learn each other’s languages.”  
“Do you think she’ll look the same when you see her again this time around,” Booker asked.  
“I don’t know. What I saw in your dreams and what I see in Nile’s are completely different. You colour your dreams with your own perspectives. You saw her as a commander. Nile looks at her like a sister. I never saw Andromache as either of those things.”  
“What do you think of her now? What will you do when you find them?”  
“Enough stalling Booker. I can see you’ve healed enough. Now will you tell me or will I have to go searching for your liver. It is a delicious organ.”  
“I don’t know where they are Quynh. I truly don’t. You watched my dreams. You know they left me.”  
“The dreams don’t show everything. Just bits and pieces. You should know. You didn’t see me every second. You only had an inch of the suffering I endured and you eventually found a way to drown me out didn’t you. Tell me, what would your wife think of her husband becoming a drunkard?” Booker knew Quynh only brought up Amélie to hurt him and it did but not like how Quynh meant it to. Talking with Quynh, someone so gone in their own pain and regret, was strangely and worryingly cathartic. There was nothing he could say to her that would scare or offend her. He had held back so much from the others. For different times and for different reasons. At first it had been mistrust, they were strangers in a strange time for him. Then it had been spite, they represented what he had just lost. He didn’t want or need a new family, he only wanted the one that had so cruelly been taken from him. Eventually it was because he was afraid they’d turn him away. He needed them, like he needed oxygen. He simultaneously clung to them and kept them at arm's length never letting them close but never letting them leave. Ironic how often the thing that you fear is the thing that you cause.  
“She’d kick my ass, I’ll tell you that much. After my time in prison I’d started drinking the first few weeks so I could sleep at night. I’d wake up hungover and grumpy. I don’t think I was a very good father. Eventually Amélie had enough. She placed the bottles out the door and told me if I wanted them I could sleep with them there.”  
“I think I would have liked your Amélie,” and with that Quynh returned to her slicing. Booker wasn’t sure how long Quynh had had him for. He’d been in Paris for six months before Quynh had showed up in his apartment. She’d kicked the shit out of him and drugged him. He’d woken to this secondary location, he wasn’t sure where. He thought it’d been less than a week but he couldn't be sure. His room was in a basement somewhere, nothing in it besides a shower and toilet in the corner and a drain in the middle of the floor. She had bolted a chair to the ground before his arrival which is where she attached the collar chain to. No windows and Quynh had no solid schedule. She’d come and go at random intervals. Quynh oscillated between completely insane and a blank slate. Sometimes she would spend hours stabbing him, sitting on his chest till he took a breath then descend on him again, repeating this over and over. He’d truly learned the extent of his regeneration. Other times she’d sit in her chair and just stare at him in silence. 

Eventually he’d just started talking to her when she got in those moods. He just couldn’t handle the silence. He told her about his past. He told her about the last year. He’d told her about how Joe’s favourite movies were Monty Python, the Cornetto Trilogy, and anything by Taika Waititi. The two of them would go to the theatres together because Andy didn’t get the humour and Nicki disliked the smells in the theatres.  
How Nicki was fiercely competitive but hated modern sports, so he’d had to come up with other ways to compete. He told her about their stupid wagers and the game they’d played for awhile called what are the odds. It was a game where one of them would suggest the otheri do something ridiculous like, “what are the odds you’d go streaking through the hallways of the hotel tonight with only a sky mask,” and they would respond with a number, usually 10, 50, or 100. Then the two of them would say a number from 1-whatever they had suggested and if they said the same number the daree would have to do whatever it was the darer had suggested. Booker was very good at guessing which number Nicki would say. Joe accused him of being a mind reader more than once. Nicki just said he was lucky, to which Booker vehemently disagreed. Eventually Andy had forbidden the game, at least during ongoing missions, when Nicki had had to go sit in a fountain fully dressed in the middle of Berlin, during an op. They may have gone a little overboard.  
He’d told her about how Andy drank almost as much as he did. How she cried in almost every movie at the slightest hint of an unhappy ending, so she rarely watched any anymore, and how she vehemently refused to watch any more dog movies since Old Yeller. He’d told her how Andy would complain like an old woman about modern humour. She was much more into slapstick. She’d loved Charlie Chapin, Fred Karno, and the Three Stooges.  
Earlier after telling Quynh about how they’d all met Charlie Chaplin once and Andy had gotten a signature, Quynh had asked him why if he had loved them all so much he had betrayed them. She then proceeded to electrify him to death a few times before picking up her knife. 

Back in the beginning of his banishment the group hadn’t contacted him at all the first week. Then in the middle of the night, Joe had texted him a poop emoji. Nothing else. From then on once or twice a week a text would come in. It was usually some kind of passive aggressive emoji, meme, or gif. He’d gotten the angry women and the cat, the labels on the crying woman and the woman supporting her being Joe and Nicky respectively and the cat being Booker. Next was the super intense crying girl explaining something to her mom, which was labeled "when Booker tries to explain his reasoning for betraying everyone" and the mom as Andy. Next is the kid running around with a knife with his mom shouting “no,” after him. Joe had labeled the kid Booker and Nicky as the mom. Booker really didn’t understand any of it. He figured Nile must have been teaching Joe about modern communication and he was practicing on him, while still showing his displeasure. Joe’s ridiculous sense of humour was one of his coping mechanisms. For as hot as Joe could come off in the initial of his hurt and anger, it was never sustained. Joe was naturally a happy and positive person. He couldn't sustain anger, it just wasn't in him. It always soothed out into bitter morbid jokes. Something the two of them had connected over.  
A couple days after Joe had started texting him, Nile had called. She asked him how he was doing and then told him all about her week. She was learning different things from each of the team. Nicki was teaching her cooking and swordplay. Yusuf was teaching her hand to hand, and painting. Andy was teaching her strategic planning and helping her brush up on her Spanish. Booker had listened patiently and then asked why she had called. She explained that she needed to learn french and that even though he had been banished, he wasn’t allowed to be a slacker. He was responsible to teach her too. So Booker recommended a language workbook and bi-weekly they would practice and go over her homework.  
Around the same time as the texting with Joe had started, mysterious packages started showing up on Booker’s front porch. It changed between personal hygiene items, bags of fresh food from the local markets, and self-help books. Booker had texted Joe and Joe had explained that Nicki was worried about him taking care of himself and then sent a gif of a penguin smacking another penguin into the water.  
A couple weeks after that, Booker started getting texts of selfies from Andy. It was the least Andy-like thing he could possibly imagine but Booker figured that while Andy was reaching out to him, she was simultaneously punishing Copley, who would have to scrub the image every time it was sent. Nile had told him about their new partnership with the former agent. So at random intervals Booker would receive Andy flexing in front of the tower of Giza, making duck face in front of the egyptian pyramids, and pretending to fall from the cliff near Cristo Redentor in Rio. It was bizarre and extremely heartwarming.  
It wasn’t at all what Booker had expected when they had banished him. It was simultaneously relieving and painful as hell. How was he suppose to earn their forgiveness when they wouldn’t let him serve his fucking sentense. 

Booker was thrust back out of his mind and into his body as Quynh finally did find his liver and pulled it out with her bare hand. He didn’t overly mind the torture actually. Don’t get him wrong, it was torture, it sucked but it felt better than the past six months had. Before he had just been wallowing in self hatred. There was nothing he could do to make what he had done right. So he drank, occasionally committed suicide and when it inevitably didn't stick he'd immersed himself in self pity and regret. Every phone call with Nile, text message from Joe, selfie from Andy, and package from Nicki just rubbed salt in the wound but he was too lonely to let them completely cut him off like he deserved. He also wasn’t going to stand in the way of them processing or punishing him whoever they felt like they needed to. This though. Suffering to protect them. This at least felt like purgatory, suffering for his sins till he’d paid enough to pass through the pearly gates. Even as he thought it he could hear Joe scoffing about Catholic boys and their self flagellation.  
When he came back, liver regenerated, he was relieved to see that Quynh had not followed through on her threat to eat his liver. It had been tossed in the corner trash can, along with various toes, finger nails, and teeth that he had lost previously. He was pulled back into focus when Quynh grabbed the chain around his neck and tugged.  
“Tell me where they are!” Quynh had lost something the past few minutes while she had been rooting around in his torso and then waiting for him to return, turning manic and desperate.  
“They abandoned you Booker, just like they did me. Left you by the wayside. You don’t owe them anything. You already betrayed them and if you think this will earn their faith back you’re an idiot. They will never trust you again but it could be me and you. I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you. I’m as dead and crazy inside as you are. We’ll make them pay, together. Just tell me where they are.”  
“I don’t know Quynh and even if I did, I’d never tell you.” Booker did know where they were, or at least where they had been. The last selfie he had received from Andy, he had recognized the cafe she was in. She was doing an impression of Marilyn Monroe in front of painting of her. They were in Tel Aviv but he was never telling Quynh that. Not when this was his penance. He deserved this. He’d earned it. Even if he was never forgiven, never let back in. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he did and he didn’t have a choice about living so he didn’t have a choice about betraying them either.  
Quynh lost it. Booker could feel her fingernails as she clawed at his face and chest. It wasn’t pleasant. He didn’t die, so he regenerated as Quynh continued to dig away. Eventually Quynh tired herself out and Booker’s eyes healed enough that he could see her collapse in her chair, shaking with repressed emotion and exhaustion. He wondered if Quynh really was a Hungry Spirit after all, sent to torture him for the rest of eternity. But that wasn’t right, Quynh didn’t deserve this, he did. So perhaps she was the righteous hand of God, meeting out his deserved punishment.


	3. La Solitude ne Souffre Pas de Deux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loneliness isn't suffered by two

Chapter Three

Later, Quynh came into the room with a cellphone and a befuddled look on her face. “Why has Yusuf sent you this? Is it some kind of code?”  
She turns the phone to him and on it is a looping gif of an angry child shaking a hairbrush at the camera. Booker snorts and then laughs hysterically. The entire situation of his life right now was just unreal. He’s an immortal warrior banished from his team of immortal warriors, imprisoned by their lost immortal warrior and his former best friend passively aggressively texts him ridiculous gifs while he’s being tortured to death over and over again without them knowing. At least, he hopes they don’t know. If they knew, and were just treating this as business as usual Booker thinks he might lose it. More than he already has anyway.   
Quynh eventually gets tired of watching him have a laughing fit/panic attack and shoots him in the head. When he comes to, he explains to her about the texting. He even opens the thread for her so she can see the whole conversation. He isn’t worried about Quynh finding anything on his phone. The photos Andy sends are always scrubbed at least within ten minutes of them being sent and Joe never texts anything that Quynh would be able to use against them. He watches in amusement as Quynh scrolls through his conversation with Joe. She looks pretty dead pan at all of them till one finally gets her to crack a smile. She turns the phone to Booker. It’s the meme of beating a motherfucker with another motherfucker and Booker laughs. It’s one of the most Joe things he’s ever seen. He’d laughed, alone in his apartment, when he’d first got the message. It feels better laughing about it now with Quynh. Something they can share together.   
Suddenly the phone in Quynh’s hand starts ringing and Nile’s name comes up on the screen. Both Booker and Quynh flinch at the sudden noise and then go deadly still. It rings twice before Booker speaks, “Quynh, answer the phone. Let me talk to her. I’ll tell her it’s not a good time. If I don’t answer she’ll think something’s wrong.”  
“Something is wrong Booker,” Quynh says as she stares at the phone, contemplating. She suddenly bursts across the room and Booker flinches away from her. She turns on the shower in the corner, the one she uses to wash Booker when the blood and all other unmentionables get to be too much. She then stands back in front of him and presses a finger to her red lips as she answers the phone.  
“Hello, Sebastien’s phone,” she answers the phone on speaker with a high pitched nasally voice. Booker opens his mouth but the look Quynh gives him clamps his teeth shut.   
“Um… who is this?” Nile’s voice comes through the tinney speaker and Booker feels tears gather at the corners of his eyes. He fights to keep them at bay.  
Quynh snorts unattractively and replies with the fake voice, “I’m Jenny. Seb’s in the shower right now.”  
“Ok well can you tell him Nile’s on the line for him.”   
“Yeah sure. Seb, some Nile girl you never told me about is on the phone for you.”  
Booker looks helplessly up at her waiting for her direction. She gives him a pointed look before putting the phone in front of him. Booker clears his voice and puts everything in him to keep his voice from shaking.  
“Oh uh hey Nile. What’s up?”  
“It’s time for our lesson,” she says down the line sounding somewhere between suspicious and disappointed.   
“Oh fuck, uh Nile I’m sorry. I lost track of the day. Do you mind if we skip this week? I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment.” Booker gives Quynh a deadly stare when she giggles loud enough for Nile to hear.   
“Hey yeah man. You do you. I’ll call again in a couple weeks okay?” Nile says and her voice has definitely gone to disappointment now and something ugly twists in Booker’s stomach.   
“Yeah Nile, I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you I promise. Talk to you next time.”  
“Sebastien, who the hell…” Quynh says in her false voice, hanging up mid sentence and drops the act.   
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Quynh asks, her eyes deadly.  
“I don’t want them here,” Booker says. He’d been so tense through all of the phone call that his jaw aches.   
“Are you afraid they won’t come for you even if they knew?” Quynh asks and Booker curses her for being so observant, “because they wouldn’t. You deserve to be here, Booker. You deserve to be abandoned and forgotten. You betrayed them. They were so good to you. You had everything and you threw it all away. Not like me, I did nothing wrong and I suffered for 500 years. I did nothing wrong and they still abandoned me. They forgot about me and filled their wretched hearts with you. Soon they’ll forget all about you and Nile will be the one who will replace us both.”   
Quynh was yelling by the end and Booker hung his head in shame. He knew it was true. Quynh spent the next few hours with him and a machete. 

“It wasn’t suppose to be torture. It was supposed to be medical research. Copley’s a good man, I trusted him when he said he found someone who could help us. I knew that the team would never go in voluntarily, so I set them all up to be taken. I figured that once we were all there, they’d see the benefit. Andy and I had been so damn miserable for so long I figured she’d be all in. Nicky and Joe have only ever wanted to do what was best for the people in this world. I thought I was handing them the keys to saving millions. Besides, one day one of them will die and what will the other do. I thought I was sparing them future suffering, suffering that Andy and I had already experienced. I was dangerously optimistic and naive as fuck. I should have asked more questions, vetted the contacts. I should have known there's no such thing as a moral pharmaceutical company. I fucked up but I didn’t mean to betray them like that.”  
“Did you explain all of that to them?”  
“No. Whether it was malice or incompetence it doesn’t matter. The result was the same,” Booker finished saying as his hand finally grew back. Honestly he thinks he’d rather they think it was malice than to think him incompentant. Quynh had tired out again and watched him as various body parts had needed to regenerate. She scooped up the bits that weren’t needed anymore and dumped them in the trash. It had started to smell something foul.   
Because of the call from Nile earlier Booker knew that Quynh had had him for five days now. Five days of all conceivable forms of torture that Quynh could come up with. She was an imaginative woman. Booker had done the math for Quynh while she had been trying death by a thousand cuts on him. If she lasted four minutes between each death for 500 years she’d died something like 65,700,000 times. Booker quickly wished he had never done the math.   
“Why hasn’t Nile seen us yet in her dreams?” Booker asked when Quynh had sat back down.  
“I met her,” Quynh answered, picking flakes of dried blood from beneath her fingernails. Booker’s spine goes so straight so fast he feels a bit faint, or maybe it’s just the all consuming panic.  
“What do you mean you met her? Did you do something to her?”  
Qyunh gave him an unimpressed look. “You spoke to her, did she sound like I had done something to her?”  
When Booker still looked green with worry Quynh sighed heavily again and looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not incompetent you know. I found her back before I had found you. The group had all split up for a couple days and I bumped into her in a busy market. Enough to make contact but not enough for her to actually acknowledge that I was the woman in her nightmares.”   
“Why didn’t you just take her then? She would have led you to the others.”  
“She was well protected, you were vulnerable and alone. They would have noticed if she went missing,” the implication that Booker’s disappearance was not noticed remained unsaid and heavy in the air between them.   
“How did you get out,” Booker shifted from his knees to cross legged, changing the subject. His pants were barely hanging on, they had been shredded by Quynh’s rage. His shirt had long since been thrown out.   
“The box finally rusted enough. I think it may have eroded years ago but I had long since stopped trying to push it open.”  
“What made you try again?”  
“Seeing you shoot Andy and her not healing,” Quynh looked up at him again and Booker wasn’t sure how this conversation could be more painful than having limbs chopped off.  
“Why didn’t you tell Nile that you had me on the phone? Why don’t you use me to set up a trap? You’ve had my phone and my contacts since you grabbed me.” Quynh stared at him again, obviously debating whether to say or not. She must have come to the same conclusion as him though, there was no point in lying to each other. They were all that the other had at this point and there was nothing they could do to hurt each other worse than they had already been hurt.  
“I don’t think I’m ready to find them,” Booker wasn't surprised by her answer. She had stopped asking him to give up their location after the first two days.  
“Are you scared you’re going to hurt her now that she can’t heal?” Booker asked.  
“Like you hurt her?" Quynh glares at him and Booker flinches.  
"I hate her. She left me, she stopped looking when she promised she wouldn’t. I want to tear her limb from limb. I want to do to her everything that I’m doing to you but I can’t. She won’t get back up. We won’t get to reconcile afterwards. I love her. I don’t want to lose her but I’m going to. It’s inevitable at this point, she’s going to die and it just makes me so angry.” Quynh had to stop for a minute, angry tears gathering in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks.   
“So I hurt you. You deserve it anyway and hurting you will hurt her without killing her.”  
“So why don’t you call her and let her see how much you’ve hurt me? At this point I think you could build a whole cadaver out of all of the various parts of me you have sitting in that trashcan back there.”  
“Because she’d hate me for this,” Quynh said with something almost akin to shame and Booker snorts derisively.   
“You really don’t see it do you? How much they love you. You were their baby. It was disgusting how they doted on you when you first arrived. You were just a kid to them and you were hurting so much. Nicky and Joe have always had a soft spot for wretched things and Andy finally had someone who just hers. Nicky and Joe came as a package and they always have and will belong to each other more than anyone else. When Andy looked at you she saw a kindred spirit. You didn't have anyone, just like her. They would have done anything for you. Anything. Had you just asked them to do the testing, they would have done anything and everything to help you.”  
“That’s horse shit, I was nothing but a burden,” Booker breathed out barely above a whisper. His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest.   
“Booker, I spent centuries with those people and from what I saw in my dreams I would not doubt for a minute their devotion for you. Even after everything you did, from what I saw through Nile’s eyes was them ache for you.”  
“Then how can you doubt their devotion to you? They spent years searching for you, tracking down every person who had anything to do with tossing you from that boat. They questioned and murdered every single one they could get their hands on. When they got to places they thought you’d be they’d swim down until they would drown and float back up. Then they tried tying anchors to their feet, searching for you on the seafloor, drowning over and over looking in the pitch dark and cold. Joe almost got trapped down there himself once. He dropped down and the pressure from the depth killed him before he could even begin to search. The pressure kept killing him within seconds of him awakening. He barely got himself out by cutting his ropes with his lungs collapsed and his blood turned to poison. Nicky and Andy had to dive over and over before they finally found his body. That’s when Andy finally called it quits. You were always the ghost in every conversation, in every mission. They were lost without you. Andy never recovered.”   
“And what about now? They have the technology, they could have found me.”   
“Quynh technology is not limitless. They did hire deep sea divers and even a submarine at one point but the ocean is kind of fucking huge. They never did get a good location for you. Some of the sailors said they had dropped you off the coast of Spain, some said near the english channel. They lied and manipulated them but by the time Andy figured it out they were already dead. Would you rather they spent the five hundred years drowning with you?”  
“Yes, at least then I wouldn’t have been alone!” Quynh shouted and then went white as a ghost. Booker started, eyes bugged out and shocked. They both took heaving breaths, having been shouting at each other for the past five minutes. Quynh left after that, slamming the door shut after herself.


	4. Le Don de la Rédemption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gift of redemption

Chapter Four

Quynh doesn’t come back for a long time after their fight. He dies from dehydration, a couple of times. He’s starting to think that maybe she just full on abandoned him and he isn’t proud of the panic that that thought inspires. The room smells unbelievably bad, as parts of him rot in the corner trash can. He doesn’t even escape the smell in his sleep. His nightmares are swarmed with the flies and carrion from the various battles he’s waged, immersed in blood and death. He may shed some self pitying tears but no one is there to see them. When he wakes from his latest death she’s there on her chair reading a book. There’s a meal set up in front of him and a water bottle. He descends on them. After eating and chugging the water Booker realizes the book Quynh’s reading is one of the one’s Nicky had sent him. It’s Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Booker had dutifully tried to read each of the books Nicky had sent but had quickly become busy drinking himself to death and they had sat in his living room collecting dust.   
“This century is so soft,” Quynh says waving the book at him.   
Booker has to clear his throat a couple of times before he’s able to respond, “But not necessarily wrong.”  
“Did you read this one?”  
“I got about halfway through.” Quynh hums thoughtfully before setting aside the book. She startles him when she stands abruptly. She walks over, unlocks the chain attached to his neck, and leads him to the shower in the corner. At this point he is so covered in filth his skin is starting to smell like rot. This is the third shower she’s allowed him so he knows the drill. He shucks the bedraggled and blood stained jeans and underwear. He throws them in the corner trash can, both landing with dull thunks. There isn’t any sense in modesty at this point, and neither of them feel any sort of shame in the face of his nudity. There’s more sexual chemistry between elderly nuns than there is between him and Quynh. She treats his nudity like something of a pet. Perfunctory and bored. This time though she changes up their routine by cutting the ropes from his wrists. She keeps a gun on her but doesn't point it at him as he washes. He’s also shocked to see some of the grooming items from Nicky in the shower. He’s unimaginably grateful to be able to shave, even if he cuts himself several times for lack of a mirror. After he’s showered off she presents him with a pair of clean sweat pants and a long sleeve t-shirt. He slips them on, smelling like the lavender shampoo that Nicky buys and clean clothes. It almost covers the stench of decay.  
“We’re going upstairs for a bit but the second you don’t behave, I shoot you in the head and leave you down here for another week. Got it? Now grab the trash and carry it up for me won’t you dear?” Booker nods and goes through the door she points to with the gun. They head up the stairs and Booker isn’t surprised to see it’s a small and featureless cabin. It’s just after dark but Booker can see they are surrounded by trees. The stars are bright in the sky, not dulled at all by light pollution. It doesn’t look like they are anywhere near any sort of civilization. First she leads him outside. The smell of the forest is intoxicating, as is the feeling of fresh wind. He stops suddenly. He feels sweat break out on his forehead and the hair on the back of his neck stands on end as Quynh directs him to a shallow grave dug in the backyard. Quynh smiles at him and reassures,“It’s only for the parts of you in the trash can, not all of you.” She directs him to dump the trash and then to use the shovel to bury the pieces. It’s an odd experience burying your own body and Booker isn’t sure he’d like to repeat it.   
She leads him back inside afterwards, to the living room where she reattaches the chain where it’s bolted to the floor beneath the couch. She gets him to sit on the floor at the foot of the couch she sets herself on. Then she begins reading aloud. There’s a small fire in the fireplace. It’s cozy and Booker feels a little bit like a housepet. It makes him very uncomfortable. He listens for ten minutes before he bursts out, “What the fuck is going on?”   
Quynh puts down her book and glares at him, “Whatever do you mean Booker?”  
“What do I mean? First you barely leave for an hour torturing me for weeks on end. Then suddenly nothing. You leave me alone down there for days, letting me die over and over…”   
Quynh interrupts him rolling her eyes,“Oh don’t be overdramatic. It could have only been twice, three times tops.”  
Booker ignores her interruption and reiterates, “Over and over, alone. Then you get me to bury my own body parts before setting me up here to read Nicky’s emotional health mumbo jumbo at me?”   
“Do you prefer the basement?”  
“No.”  
“Then shut up.”  
“But why? I don’t get it?” Booker never was good at self preservation.   
“I’m trying something new,” Quynh says after five minutes of glaring.  
“Boring me to death?”   
“I’m trying to be normal you ass.”  
“Why?”  
“Because I want to,” Quynh says petulant. They glare at one another neither one willing to coincide until finally Booker huffs, “Well even your normal is fucking bonkers.”   
Quynh precedes to ignore him and continue reading aloud. Booker sits there, in shock. He crosses his arms and huffs again. Quynh continues to read, so Booker is forced to listen. It’s weird. She reads for quite awhile. She’s a very good reader, articulate and expressive but not overly animated. Booker wonders if she learned to read English from watching him read. After a while Quynh finishes the chapter they’re on and closes the book. She unlocks the chain and leads him over to a side room where there's a cot and blanket. She gets him to carry them down to the basement, where he sets them up. She ties his hands back together and reattaches the chain. Then without a word or a backward glance, she leaves. 

This starts a new routine in which Booker gets to sleep on the cot, with the blanket. She even brings him some cleaning supplies so he can clean up the blood and decaying goop from the floor, and the walls, and “ew is that an ear on the ceiling.” Quynh brings him food, and then they go up to the first floor together. Quynh either reads aloud or they sit and watch tv. Booker is always sitting on the floor, collar attached to the chain. It feels degrading and confusing. He just wishes she would hurt him again so he would know what was happening, where they stood. She barely treats him like a person through all of this. It’s just so perfunctory, like they are little glass dolls in a playhouse. This goes on for nearly a week before Quynh brings him upstairs one day and sits him at the kitchen table. She lays out a french english workbook and hands him his phone.   
He’s shocked to discover that it’s been two weeks since his last call with Nile. It’s a little after 8 in the morning and his phone rings. Quynh sits across the table from him and says with deadly calm, “You hint to her in any way that I'm here or that you’re in trouble and I’ll bury her in the backyard with your rotting pieces. Got it?” Booker nods and answers the phone on speaker.   
“Nile, how’s it going?”  
“Fucking terrible. Andy’s got it in her head that I need to brush up on my math skills. Who the fuck needs math when I have a literal supercomputer in my pocket,” Nile complains good naturadly. Booker can hear Andy laughing in the background. Quynh goes so still at the sound that Booker’s sure for a moment she’s full turned into a statue.   
“Hey I’m sorry about last time Nile. There’s no excuse for missing our lesson. It won’t happen again,” Booker says with a subtle look at Quynh, who has gone back to picking at her nails.   
“No I’m glad you have someone. Even if she sounded like a bit of a psycho.”  
“You don’t know the half of it,” Booker says glaring at Quynh, who flashes him a smile that is all teeth. Booker continues, “Anyway I don’t have someone, it was just a one time thing. Anyway, chapter 12 right?” Booker proceeds to go over the homework with her and they converse in french for a bit, roleplaying an interaction at a restaurant. Nile’s accent is horrendous and it’s extremely and unreasonably endearing. Despite the accent though, Nile is learning quickly. She’s a bright and attentive student. Booker enjoys going over homework with her like this. It reminds him of helping his son’s with their learning, and the remembrance is bittersweet. They end the lesson an hour and a half later. Just as he’s about to hang up, Nile stops him with what she says next, “Booker, if you do find someone, that’s okay. You know it’s okay to find comfort in someone right. We won’t judge. We want you to be happy.” Booker swallows hard nodding along and then clears his throat, “Yeah, I don’t think my happiness is really anyone’s priority right now but thanks kid.”   
Nile sighs over the phone and continues, “You know I didn’t agree with this banishment thing right? It isn’t going to help, it's all very archaic. You need support to get better. But I understand why the other’s felt like they needed space. You hurt them, badly and I think that partly they want to hurt you with this, to punish you, but it’s also space for them to heal. It’s good to have boundaries, for all parties involved. They’ll figure out soon that this isn’t what they want. Just hang in there Booker and try to get some help okay? Reach out, get some friends, maybe try going to church or join a book club or something. Please don’t just wallow and waste away alright. You deserve better than that.”  
He thanks her woodenly and hangs up quickly. Quynh’s eyes are heated brands as he meets her gaze. She brings him back downstairs afterwards and locks him back up before bed. 

The next few days continue somewhat the same. Quynh brings him up, they chill for a while, Quynh on the couch with Booker on the floor. Booker hardly hears Quynh reading anymore, his mind buzzing with thoughts. He can’t get what Nile said out of his head. It circles around like a ball in a pinball machine, bouncing painfully as it goes. A quote from N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate comes to his mind, “There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you... - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.” What Nile had said felt dangerously like hope and Booker ruthlessly puts it to death.

One fateful morning Quynh brings him upstairs and there’s a pillow at the base of the couch. He would think it had just fallen from the couch except that it’s a new pillow, one he’s never seen before. He stays stock still and stares at it. Quynh sits on the couch and holds up the chain in one hand expectantly. When he doesn’t move she shakes the chain at him, “Come on puppy, I don’t have all day.”  
She doesn’t have the gun in her other hand. Booker feels ridiculously angry suddenly. From the moment she first got her hands on him Booker hasn’t fought back. He was too exhausted, too listless. Now though he throws himself at her, straddling her on the coach and raining punches down on her. She manages to wriggle her body till she gains the leverage to flip him. They go tumbling to the ground together and wrestle, each trying to gain the upper hand. Booker is much bigger, and much stronger, but trying to hold onto Quynh is like trying to hold onto a struggling cat. She’s quick, flexible, and mean. She doesn’t hesitate to bite, scratch, or kick him in the balls. Eventually she’s at his back and she’s strangling him with the chain. He realizes distantly that with all of the different ways Quynh had tortured him, she’d never drowned or strangled him before. That had been her limit to their suffering. He gasps and panics, stuck in this moment and yet he feels unbearably cold, like he did in Russia. He can almost feel his fingers dying from frostbite once again, or the crows who had sat and picked at him while he was still tied up. He finally goes limp as the blood vessels in his eyes burst and his vision darkens and goes out.   
He comes back to life in the basement again. His hands are tied and the chain is firmly in place. He can feel bones popping back into place and figures Quynh had probably just rolled his body down the stairs rather than carrying him. She’s pacing in the back of the room, huffing as she goes.   
“Why? Why would you do that? We were getting along. I was getting better. Booker what’s wrong with you?” Quynh rails at him, flipping the cot.   
“I’m not your pet! You don’t get to coddle and pamper me like some labradoodle. Sit me at your feet, read to me by the fire, and buy me fucking pillows. I’m your prisoner Quynh, act like it,” Booker shouts and Quynh sits down heavily in her chair.   
“The pillow? You did this because I gave you a pillow?” She stares at him for an uncomfortable amount of time before she speaks again, “Are you using me to punish yourself?”  
Booker flinches and tries to deny it but realizes he can't. His thoughts fly back to that pillow. It had been degrading and awkward sitting at Quynh’s feet everyday but he still felt like a prisoner. That pillow was her trying to be nice, trying to ease his suffering, and he hadn’t been able handle that.   
“You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to use me like that,” Quynh says when he remains in stunned silence.  
“You’ve been torturing me! I think I get to do whatever the hell it is that I want to do Quynh.”  
“No you don’t. I get it. I’m sorry. I’m so fucked up Booker! My brain feels like it’s on fire half the time, just all of my nerves and senses screaming at me and the other half I’m completely numb, nothing feels real. I want to destroy you but I know I shouldn’t. I shouldn't have hurt you. It was wrong but don’t you see I'm trying to make it right.”  
“By treating me like a pet? I don’t want you to pamper me. I don’t deserve it. We’re enemies Quynh. Treat me like one.”   
“No, I don’t want to anymore. I want this to be different. I want to be different. I don’t want to be the monster who’s torturing the baby. You don’t even fight back, you’re so miserable it’s depressing. I’m just… I’m so, so tired of being alone Booker. I don’t have a lot of time left before Andy’s gone. I need to get better before it's too late.”  
“So you can have your happy ending?” Booker scoff’s cruelly. “People like you and I don’t get happy endings Quynh. That isn’t the genre of our book. We’re tragedies, horror, or macabre humour at best.”   
“I strangled you,” Quynh says with horror in her eyes, looking down at her hands. “I never wanted to do that. You weren’t even there at the end were you? You were back on that rope in Russia, reliving that terrible rebirth. If you don’t want to help me get better okay. I don’t expect that from you after what I’ve done but please, don’t make me worse,” and with that she leaves the room again. 

Booker sits in the silence of the basement for a long time. He feels bad for hurting Quynh. He can see now how she had been trying, in a very bizarre and wacked out way, to build the relationship between them. Then he gets angry at himself for feeling bad. She’d suffered yes but that didn’t excuse what she’d done to him, what she’d do to the rest of them if she got the chance. But she was trying. Even with how incredibly messed up she was, she was trying. For Andy. Because she loved Andy and it was true what she said. She didn’t have much time left. Fifty years was a blink of an eye to them but that was probably all the time that Andy had left for this world and that was assuming she didn’t get herself killed before old age finally found her. Booker missed Andy so intensely it stole his breath away. He had nearly stolen her life from her, with his selfish plan, not on her terms like she would have wanted but in betrayal. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. Nicky and Joe, they deserved to have him suffer, for what he had subjected them to but he’d see them at the end. Andy only had so much time left and if he could give her Quynh back, a fully healed and whole Quynh, that would maybe be the gift that could give her peace before her end. Booker set his jaw, a new determination in his gut and waited for the door to open.

“I went looking for you once,” Booker starts talking the next time Quynh opens the door. It’s been maybe a day since she left him here and Booker had been so afraid she might not come back. “It was after my family was gone. I was so sick of dreaming of you and I heard about these new diving suits. So I chartered a ship and got a suit. I didn’t tell any of the others, I didn’t want to get their hopes up. I did get some training but not a lot was known about deep sea diving at the time. It seemed a simple enough concept. I looked for a few months, following half cocked stories about women haunting ships at certain points. Do you know what happens when you have a rapid build up of high pressure at that depth? I didn’t. One dive I went deep, really deep, and the suit got punctured. The water pushes in on your body, causing the space filled with air to collapse, all the air in your lungs is forced out. Usually your lungs collapse and all the air escapes up to where it isn’t as pressurized but I was in a suit. The problem with the suit was that when it depressurized, the soft part of the suit and my entire body was crushed right into the rigid helmet because that’s where the closest unpressurized air was. It was by far the most horrific death I had ever experienced. My body kept trying to reform but I was soup in a helmet. It took me weeks to heal from that, washed up on the shores of Spain but I had had short excruciating moments of life throughout. So yeah I stopped looking for you after that and I made sure the others didn’t start up again but it was agonizing to stop looking. I wanted so badly to find you and make it all stop because the dreams were only half the torment. The other half was the constant reminder that Nicky, Joe, and Andy loved you and suffered because you suffered. I had to watch as Nicky and Joe held so tightly onto each other. Andy said that after they lost you Nicky and Joe changed their fighting styles completely. They became almost codependent. Constantly watching each other’s backs and not like in a safe way but in a desperate, sad, and dangerous way. Their eyes were constantly on one another after a death, waiting for the first breath. They were liabilities for a long time, distracted at the prospect of losing one another. There were a few times they would leave Andy or I open by accident, because of this. Eventually Andy helped them sharpen up their skills, to cover the holes in their defences that their new anxieties had created but not before a few notable instances. It’s still there, the constant anxiety of losing one another like Andy had lost Quynh. I watched the light and hope slowly fade as your absence drained Andy. She drank and she was a mean and solitary drunk. There were times Joe would take me out so Nicky could take care of her. I don’t think they liked me being around her like that. Andy and I would feed off one another's misery, creating dangerous downward spirals. We once came upon a village in sub-saharan Africa in the late 90’s. Andy was, not good. Sometimes she'd see someone who reminded her of you, or it would be an anniversary of some kind. I don't know what it had been this time but Andy was already in a mood. There was this village we went to and they were trying to kill an albino girl, calling her a witch and such. The girl was maybe two, her mom was a wreck, clinging to her and screaming at them. Andy tore through that village. Came up behind those people and cut them like so much chaff. We had to put her down, she would have burned the whole thing to the ground. She left us for two years after that. She was the most amazing, most remarkable woman I had met, besides Amélie, and she was slowly dying despite being immortal, from loving you.”  
Booker took a deep breath and held Quynh’s eyes.   
“If you really want to get better for Andy, to be with her again before the end, then I’ll help you. But let’s do it right.”  
“What do you have in mind?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always been so horrified by pressure deaths and I recently was reading about how this actually happened to people in those suits, which is why they are not used anymore. *shivers* So I just had to add it to the story. Hope you enjoyed.


	5. Une Femme aux Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Woman With Secrets

Chapter Five

Booker really didn’t know what he had in mind. It was back to square one for him. Back when he had been on the banks of the Thames river with no clue what to do next. Booker had been so listless for so many years. Not a drive to do anything, just going along with whatever the group had wanted to do or whatever Andy told them to do. He think's it's one of the reason's Andy agreed to work for Copley a second time. Booker had so rarely taken the initiative like that. Booker feels ashamed that because of their kindness for him, his friends had suffered.  
He asked Quynh for a laptop. She insisted on sitting over his shoulder for the entire time, watching his every move. He started to look up PTSD, and trauma. They watched a lot of videos together and they took notes. When a youtube video described the different symptoms, they would write down which ones they experienced. Quynh insisted that if she was forced to try this new age bullshit then he was too. They went through various video’s including ones about depression, dissociation, manic episodes, anxiety, anger, and control. They contemplated going out and getting a therapist but neither of them knew A: someone trustworthy enough or B: anyone qualified to handle two immortal warriors with thousands of years between the two of them. They explored many options but settled on three. They both liked the ideas of nature therapy, art therapy, and animal therapy. All three were ways they could start to explore their own grief and trauma without having to involve outside help.  
They decide to go looking for some pets. Both of them felt like part of the problem was how bored they were. When they were with the team there was always something to do. There was no time to feel any sort of way because you were just trying to get through the job. Now there was nothing but time to feel every bit of anxiety, anger, or guilt they had bottled for centuries. It would spill out of them in little ways. Fights over absolutely nothing, like "you breath too fucking loud," or "I can see your refection in the tv and it's annoying." Some days one of them just wouldn't get out of bed. When Quynh had those days, both of them stayed in bed because Booker was still being tied up at night. Quynh doesn’t trust him enough not to run off yet but Booker really doesn't mind. They needed something to take their mind off things. Busyness and a bustling farm seemed like a good place to start. Turns out that Quynh had taken him to the rural french Alps, near Grenoble. The cabin was an hour outside the nearest small town and there was already a barn and corral on the property that just needed a bit of maintenance.  
So Booker and Quynh take the old beat up farm truck that Quynh had and head into town to procure the necessary materials. Quynh is forced to take off the collar, after threatening Booker with being drawn and quartered if he tried anything. When they’re in the store Quynh hangs onto Booker’s arm with a painful grip. A customer a few rows away ends up spilling something metal and noisy and Quynh’s eyes go terrified and wide. Booker has heard the sound of the dull thuds from Quynh’s desperate attempts at escape and the sound from rows over is barely reminiscent but enough that she is scratching at his arm. He tries to calm her with his words, holding her closer to his side. It’s only when the breath from his talking rustles her hair that she finally gets a moment of clarity in her eyes. They get the materials needed and make their way back to the cabin. On a whim Booker sets up a fan in her room at home and Quynh actually starts to sleep the nights through. From then on they learn that if she gets a flashback to set her up in front of a fan, or to get her outside so she could feel the wind.  
They spend the next couple of days patching the fences and cleaning the barn. It’s hard but satisfying work. While they work they talk about what animals they want. They immediately have to curb the desire for wilder pets, even though both of them would kill for a tiger. It would attract too much attention and they had watched Tiger King on Netflix. Neither of them liked the idea of caging a wild thing. They compromise to get two farm animals each. Quynh decides on getting a pig and a dog. Booker decides on a goat and a horse. Booker starts to make inquiries online and soon they find a farmer who is selling Kunekune piglets. The two of them make the road trip and Qyunh has a litter of 14 piglets to choose from. She chooses a tiny ginger piglet with black spots and names her Bian, which she explains to Booker means a woman with secrets. The farmer also has an old donkey that he is trying to sell and though Booker had wanted a horse, he feels a certain kinship with the decrepit thing. He names it Alonso, after Don Quixote.  
Next they go searching for Quynn’s dog. They go to the closest animal shelter and Qyunh spends all of five minutes before she finds a giant Great Pyrenees. It’s coat is pure white and it has the most pathetically endearing eyes Booker has ever seen. She names him Chi, a man with purpose.  
Finally they find another farmer who is selling some goat kids. He picks a dopey looking golden haired kid and names it Roi-Soleil or the Sun King named for the author of The Little Prince. Once again Booker and Quynh find themselves talked into another purchase, this time it’s a clutch of five chicks. They argue the whole way back to their place but in the end Quynh wins and the chicks are named Sporty, Posh, Ginger, Scary, and Baby. Much to Booker’s horror and hours of irritation in their car, Quynh has recently become a Spice Girl enthusiast. They pick up some chicken wire and feed on their way home and make a makeshift hutch out of an old cabinet.  
So starts their new way of life. They wake up every morning and go out to feed the animals. Much to Booker’s chagrin he finds out on the third day of their new schedule that Quynh has taken to sleeping with Bian.  
“She’s my pig Booker, I’ll do what I want!”  
“It’s a farm animal Quynh, it belongs in the barn,” Booker didn’t know why he argued, there hadn’t been an argument yet that he had won with her and he doesn’t win this one.  
After the morning chores the two of them would retreat inside to eat breakfast themselves. They’d take turns cooking and cleaning each of the meals, even though both of them are rather hopeless cooks. They reminisce together over the loss of Nicki’s food in their lives. They would even prefer Joe's to their own but they both agree that they are better cooks than Andy.  
Next they’d spend a couple hours a day watching a Bob Ross video and painting. Booker is familiar with painting, he’s never been an artist but he was a decent art forger. Quynh though was terrible. Her paintings looked to be created by a two year old. She was terrible at shapes, they were all lumpy and misshapen. Her trees looked pathetically like sticks. Her mountains looked like misshapen Doritos. Her perspective was always off. Quynh was nevertheless proud of each one, putting hers and Booker’s next to each other up on the walls. Soon their empty cabin was filled with eclectic art. After painting was concluded they would eat lunch and then go for a walk in the surrounding woods. The nearest neighbour was miles away. They would take their animals with them. The first few days were comedy level disasters. The goat hated the pig, the dog was mother hen obsessed with the chicks, who were terrified of the dog, and the donkey would run spooked out of his mind whenever any of them made too sudden of movements or noises, making Booker have to chase after. Eventually though, they figured each other out.  
After tucking the animals away and eating dinner, Booker and Qyunh would spend their evenings reading one of Nicky’s books, watching YouTube psychology videos, or watching a movie. Booker started educating Quynh on the team’s favourite movies. They quickly discovered that Quynh did not like modern movies. She complained that they moved too fast, were too violent and had too many colours. They found her niche while watching Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She enjoyed the slower pace and the over dramatic slow burn and loved a happy ending.  
Before they knew it months had passed. It was touch and go for the first bit. Booker had been a city boy all his life and hadn’t had much time or need to learn the day to day of farm life. Quynh did once upon a time know how to run a farm and keep animals but she’d forgotten much of what she used to. He read what he could and he and Quynh watched videos online but that didn't really prepare them for being farmers. Quynh would get upset and angry when things didn’t go well. Booker never knew what would set her off. Sometimes the animals wouldn’t want to play or snuggle with her and she’d lock herself in her room for hours. Other times they weren’t behaving or she wasn't able to perform a task and she’d get frustrated. In the beginning she had a hair trigger for violence. Booker made sure she would take her displeasure out on him in those moments, goading her and placing himself in her path. He would heal and Quynh would be terribly upset if in one of her manic episodes she had hurt one of the animals. After each time Quynh would go quiet and withdrawn. Booker would lure her back with tea and assure her that she was getting better but that these things took time. As time passed Quynh was getting better and better at keeping her anger inside. She’d shout or go storming off for a walk but she was learning how to curb her violence. They’d watched some videos on PTSD and anger, learned how Quynh needed to rewire her brain with repeated practice. They started practicing yoga and meditation at night before bed. Booker learned he was terribly out of shape and very inflexible. Quynh loved mocking his yoga but she found laying on the ground in silence quite triggering. They instead set her sitting up in front of the fan. Quynh also started counting and deep breathing exercises when the anger grew. It was exhausting and confusing but eventually they started to run the farm with a decent level of competence and were learning to live with one another. They would talk but much of their time was spent in companionable silence.

One day over lunch Quynh asked him why he never tried to escape or reach out to the others. Booker picked at his food for a minute before answering.  
“I don’t know Quynh, I just don’t have the fight left in me anymore I guess.”  
“I think it’s because you believe you deserved it. All the torture. You hoped that if you suffered enough, it would be your penance. Not just for the betrayal of the team but for the betrayal of your family.”  
Booker could feel his face getting red with anger as she spoke, “What betrayal?”  
“You didn’t die and they did. You were supposed to take care of them, protect them but you couldn’t. You were helpless in the face of their mortality. I think that’s why you haven’t let yourself a moment of happiness for the past two hundred years. You inflicted your own suffering and embraced mine, all to try to earn some measure of forgiveness. Not for them mind you, they wouldn’t want you to suffer, but for yourself. To make living bearable, you made your life unbearable. But it wasn’t your fault Sebastien. There wasn’t anything you could have done.”  
In the rare moments that the team would talk about Quynh it was always with rose coloured glass. They would talk about how unbelievably capable she was. They described what a quick study Quynh was, how despite the sexism of the time, she excelled in fields that were typically reserved for men, and never let anyone tell her no when she knew she was right. They would say how none of them could lie to her, that she was preternaturally good at reading people. She would know within a minute with someone their greatest fear or shame and how she’d ruthlessly weaponize it or in the case of those she loved, protect them from it. Booker realizes now that Quynh had either been too crazy in the beginning to truly weaponize her talent or she wasn’t truly trying to break him. He wished desperately to get uproariously drunk but Quynh kept their stash of booze locked up.  
While Quynh talked Booker could hear a slight buzzing in his ears he was so angry. He sat back in his chair, staring at one of Quynh’s paintings on the wall. It was her favourite. It was supposed to be a mountain scene at sunset but it just looked like a pile of impressionistic blobs. The sky colours were baby blue and soft pink, with cobalt grey mountains, the tones soothing and calm. He wanted nothing more than to rip it from the wall and burn it.  
“You don’t know what the fuck your talking about. Watching crackpots on Youtube does not make you a professional,” he spoke through his teeth and left the room, scraping his chair harshly against the wood floor as he stood up. He ended up in the barn, piling hay from one corner to another for no reason other than to not have to think.

When he came in that night for bed, Quynh locked him up and then wordlessly handed him his phone and left. Booker wasn’t sure why she thought she could trust him with it now but he was grateful to have it.  
With his phone back, Booker started to see all the texts from Joe he’d missed. He laughed and his chest tightened painfully at each one. It was ridiculous, soothing and aching at the same time. Unfortunately the four selfies Andy had sent had been scrubbed already.  
Quynh didn’t bring up the conversation again and Booker pretended the whole thing had never happened. They fell back into their truce and things started to progress again. The animals grew and they grew more competent in their care. They finished a few seasons of Bob Ross and ran out of canvas and wall space. They started to paint over the ones they didn't like and rehung them on the walls.  
Every once in a while Quynh would disappear for the day. When she’d come back it would be with a pile of boxes from Nicky, she’d convinced one of his neighbours to keep them for her. In the latest batch, Nicky had sent him a pair of brightly coloured mittens as it was approaching fall. He wore them constantly and Quynh shamelessly mocked him for it but she did steal the matching toque for herself so Booker didn’t take it personally. Quynh was progressing, the nightmares becoming less frequent as were the outbursts. She was dutifully filling out a timeline of her life, highlighting traumatic events. She had posted a print out of the grief curve in her room, where she would meditate each evening. Booker was starting to think things could turn out alright. That was of course when shit hit the fan.


	6. Alonso le Malchanceux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alonso the Unlucky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Suicide Attempt.

Chapter Six  
Booker was on his newest lesson with Nile. They had finished the first book and had moved on to the next. At this point she was decently conversing in french and they were mostly working on a greater vocabulary and on the sticky details of grammar. She finished the call by asking him in french if he ever dreamed of Quynh anymore. He was silent on the phone for a few seconds, trying to curb his panic, before rallying. He responded in kind, “I don’t dream of much anymore. I learned years ago the correct cocktail to keep the dreams at bay. Even then, the dreams of Quynh were never consistent. Sometimes they’d come every night for months, sometimes weeks of nothing.” Nile hummed thoughtfully and Booker could hear her picking at something plastic on the other end of the line, the snap click coming through the speaker. “I haven’t dreamed of her for months now. Do you think she’s dead? I would have thought that at least one of us would’ve seen her die. It seems unbearably sad that she’d be dead and neither of us would have seen it. I don’t like the thought of her dying alone. I haven’t told the other yet, I don’t want to be wrong.”   
Booker sighed and opened his mouth to respond when a shriek and a crash sounded from the front yard.   
“What was that?” Nile asked with concern, switching back to english.   
“Nothing, it’s alright I’ll handle it but I’ll have to call you back okay Nile. Don’t worry, I’ll call you back,” Booker said distractedly. He hung up the phone and left it on the table as he ran from the house towards the paddock. Quynh was lying in the water trough, sopping wet while a bucking Alonso ran around wildly. Quynh frantically got to her feet, sputtering out water and stalked towards the frightened animal. Her clothes were soaked through and a mass of steam was rising from her body, making her look like a boiling pot. The air was cold with the waning of fall and the oncoming winter. Booker quickly hopped the fence and got in front of her. Her pupils were blown wide and her breaths were fast.  
“Quynh what happened? Whoa stop for a minute, what happened?” Booker held out his hands in front of her but didn’t try to touch her. Quynh shrieked in frustration again, stomping her foot like a child, and then pointed an accusatory finger at the donkey.   
“Your stupid animal will not listen to me. I’m just trying to get him out so I could feed him and he kicked me into the water! He never listens to me. He needs to learn to respect me,” She continued to stalk forward and Booker once again got in her way. Her eyes were manic and Booker knew she wasn’t actually sane at the moment. She got like this sometimes, just so entirely focused on the object of her rage and overcome with the impulse to hurt something but it’d been a long time since the last outburst. He wasn’t sure that Quynh would actually hurt the animal, she hadn’t hurt any of them, at least not on purpose, yet but Booker knew that counting and breathing weren’t going to calm her down right now, she was too far gone. ‘It just had to be water’, Booker thought bitterly to himself. The only thing Booker could do in these moments was try to limit the collateral damage, shift her focus to something that would heal; him.  
“It’s not his fault you're useless at taking care of him,” Booker accused as he made contact with her shoulders, pushing her back. Quynh’s gaze finally shifted from the frightened animal to Booker and she bared her teeth at him. “It’s not that hard Quynh you’re just too stupid and useless…” he was cut off before he could finish. He expected her to tackle him, like she usually did. Occasionally if there were projectiles around she’d hurl them at him. On notable occasions weapons at been on hand. They tried to make sure the weapons weren’t easily accessible anymore. He was prepared for any of that, he wouldn’t defend himself. Quicker than he had anticipated she had punched him in the jaw. A swift upcut rattled his teeth, knocking him down to the ground. His eyes flashed with stars and he curled to protect his vitals. Her attack was vicious and painful. She stood over him and kicked him all over his back and chest. He tried to roll away and deflect what he could, knowing she’d tire eventually.   
Unlucky was a word that Booker had long associated with his life. Unlucky to be caught forging, twice. Unlucky to go to Russia. Unlucky to be one of the only deserters caught and hanged only weeks from the end of the war. Unlucky to die and unlucky to wake up. His lack of luck continued from there and affected all those he loved. Unlucky that his wife and second son had caught sickness from helping victims of tuberculosis and died, suffocating in their beds with him a helpless onlooker. Unlucky that his body could not shield his first born or his grandson, full of passion and a desire to see justice, as they were shot down in the Paris Uprising of 1832. Unlucky that his youngest got cancer and dying cursed his father, who had been long absent and neglectful in his youth and not willing to give up his secret to save him on his deathbed. On missions it always seemed like it was him who screwed things up, whether directly or not. Unlucky to die from a bullet that slowed down the team and caused them to get unnecessarily hurt protecting him. Unlucky to miss the hidden assassin who caved Joe’s head in with a mace, spraying his blood and brains across the sand and Nicky’s face. Unlucky to trigger the hidden alarm causing Andy to be arrested and held in a dark, dank third world prison for two weeks before they could break her out. Unlucky to meet a grieving man who waxed poetic about being the cure to save the world and believing him. The last few months Booker had not forgotten about his luck, how could he? He was stuck being the plaything for an ancient mad woman but he had become complacent. Today he was starkly reminded that his stars had not realigned. Today he was unlucky when Quynh kicked him in the chest and he rolled from the impact. Unlucky that his back connected with the solid water trough, causing him to flinch away from it, leaving him further exposed to Quynh. Unlucky that the next kick missed it’s intended target and connected instead with his exposed throat. Unlucky that Booker wasn’t able to absorb the blow as well as the others because his head struck the metal trough behind him. Unlucky that instead of just stunning him or being a glancing blow, it completely collapsed his trachea with a sickening crack.   
Booker hated suffocating. Everytime he did it was humiliating and debilitating. It was a key to unlock his greatest traumas, compounding those nightmarish experiences into his present suffering. He immediately rolled into a ball, clutching at his mangled throat. He pressed his head to his knees as he desperately tried to pull in any air at all but nothing was coming in. His vision soon went spotty, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes and he could feel his senses tunneling with panic. Distantly he could feel Quynh kneeling beside him. He could hear her voice but it took a long time to actually make out what she was saying through the sudden terror.   
“Booker, Booker I’m sorry. Breathe okay. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to,” her hands hovered over him before awkwardly patting at his back as he writhed, waiting for his throat to slowly repair itself or to suffocate to death. It took an agonizing amount of time. It could have been seconds or a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours. He very nearly passed out, but eventually air squeezed back in through the damage. Little by little his breath evened out as his throat repaired itself. His esophagus returned to its shape with a pop.   
He lay there for another minute, just breathing, before he sat up on his heels, leaning against the cold trough. Quynh withdrew her hands from him, holding them in her lap, her eyes wide and shocked.   
“Go inside, I’ll finish the chores out here. Put on some tea and I’ll join you when this is done,” Booker said tiredly, not quite looking at her. Quynh opened her mouth and Booker cut her off, “I know Quynh. It’s alright. It was just bad luck.”   
Quynh reluctantly obeyed. Booker was eventually able to settle Alonso, get him fed and put away for the night.   
When he gets in the kitchen it’s dark and empty. He can see Quynh’s light on in her room and Bian is sitting at the door, snorting and snuffling at the crack at the bottom. She’d grown in the last few months, nearing 20 pounds. She was gentle and attentive for a pig, loving the attention her two human companions lavished on her. He goes and scritches her back before he knocks gently on the door. Quynh doesn’t answer and when he jiggles the knob he finds it locked. Booker tries to talk to her through the door but doesn’t get an answer.   
He settles himself in the kitchen, waiting for her to come out to lock him downstairs for the night. He waits for hours with Bian settled in his lap, sipping a cup of tea, watching the unopened door but Quynn doesn’t make an appearance. He eventually makes his own way downstairs and sleeps for the first time in months without his chains. Bian is unhappy with her new bed mate and snorts and squeals at Booker but he knows she won’t sleep upstairs without Quynh. Eventually she finally settles in his arms and they both fall asleep.  
When he awakens the next day his door is still unlocked and Quynh is gone. He checks the house but there is no sign of her. He checks the barn and finds nothing. He’s about to go search the forest but notices that the truck is gone. He goes through the morning chores numb and hazy. The animals greet him with their usual cheer, as if the world had not just shifted permanently into a darker version of itself. When he gets back in for what was art time, he instead tears Quynh’s favourite painting from the wall of the kitchen and hurls it down, splintering the frame against the wooden floor. Quynh was supposed to be the one person who wouldn’t ever leave him and yet here he was. Alone. He pants in the kitchen for a time, unsure of what to do but just feeling overwhelmingly done. He fashions a noose from some spare rope and fastens it to the support beam in the living room. He jumps from the back of the couch and prays this will be the time he finally doesn’t wake up. When he inevitably does, he doesn’t have the luck to die on his own terms, he pulls himself up and off the rope before he breaks into the locked liquor cabinet and drinks himself into a heavy stupor. 

He comes to consciousness an indeterminate amount of time later to his phone ringing in the kitchen, where he had left it the day before when he’d hung up on Nile.   
“Oh shit, Nile,” Booker bolts upright as his phone goes quiet. Bian is sleeping on her rug near the fire and he tries not to wake her. He stumbles to his phone, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and sees that he has 8 missed calls. Six from Nile and two from an unknown number. He checks his texts and sees two from Joe and one from Andy asking him to answer his phone, telling him that he’s freaking them out. Booker startles as his phone rings again, the unknown number popping up. He answers it, clearing his voice roughly. “Yeah.”  
“Booker?” comes the mild british voice from the other end. Booker didn’t honestly think he’d ever hear from him again but here he is. “Copley.”   
“Yeah, good to hear your voice Booker. Are you in the position to talk?” Copley must be either asking if he’s been compromised or if he’s wasted.   
“Yeah, I’m good. I’m good to talk,” Booker slows down his breathing, wiping his face with a sweaty palm. “Actually, would you give me a minute?”   
“Of course,” Copley responds, ever the professional. Booker sets the phone aside and gives himself a minute to think. Nile must have gotten worried when he hadn’t called back like he promised and gathered the cavalry. The team could be closing in on his location right now, sneaking in the bushes, ready to kick his door down. He needed for them not to come here. He was not ready for them to burst in, expecting to save him, only to be disappointed by his failure once again. They’d see his silence about Quynn’s return as another betrayal. His inability to help her as another incompetence. Just more reasons to never talk to him again, never trust him again. Reasons to leave him forever this time. He quickly rinses his face in the sink and slicks his hair back. He takes a few gulps of water and breathes two deep breaths, putting on a convincingly cheery disposition before picking up the phone again.   
“Sorry, you caught me in the middle of a nap.”   
“No problem. Would you be willing to make this a video chat?” to make sure that you’re not kidnapped or cohorting with enemies goes unsaid. Booker switches on his camera and suddenly James Copley’s professional poker face is filling his screen. Even with his short wash Booker still looks a mess. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is clammy and pale. Copley looks him over, not giving anything away, but smiles blandly.   
“Still haven’t aged, I see. You gave our friends quite the fright, they’ve been trying to get a hold of you since yesterday. Could you give me a view of the room you're in?”  
“Are they on their way?” Booker asks with apprehension. He pans the phone around the kitchen, making sure to not show the broken painting on the floor, or the slightly swaying noose in the living room.  
“They are on a layover in Vienna, they’ll be in Paris in four hours, unless I book them tickets somewhere else in the next two. Why are you in the middle of rural France?”   
“I moved, a few months back,” Booker says, keeping his own expression neutral; he may not have the training that Copley has but he ain’t a shabby liar. He was able to deceive the team anyway, people who had known him for centuries.   
“Why did you move from Paris?”  
“Because I’m a private man and I didn’t want a certain former agent spying on me,” Booker says and Copley smiles a smile that clearly says he isn’t amused. “I wanted to be somewhere quiet. Paris isn’t what I remembered. Far too stuffy, smelly, and loud. I needed a change of scenery.”   
“Where are you now?”   
“Can’t you see on your nifty satellites that are tracking this call?”  
“Yes but I’d like your description of it.”   
“It’s a farm, an hour outside Grenoble. Just a little cabin and a barn, nothing nefarious,” Booker sits at the kitchen table and tries to keep his hands from shaking. He needs Copley to let this go, so he tries to appear bored. “Look you called because of Nile right. I messed up, I forgot to call her back last night. Got a little too sauced and it slipped my mind.”  
Copley nodded along, like he believed him, trying to get Booker to see him as an ally. Booker wasn’t fooled. Copley asked, “She said she heard a scream. You there with anyone Booker?”   
Just then little Bian came squealing into the room. She must have noticed his absence. Even since Quynh had taken to sleeping with the little animal she’d become hopelessly attached to having people around. She’d squeal and look for them when they weren’t in the room with her. Booker thanked every one of his lucky stars and swore to spoil the pig rotten after this. He picked up the piglet and held her for Copley to see.   
“This is Bian, she knocked over a pale of water yesterday and scared herself. Hopeless little thing but good company. I was worried she had hurt herself which is why I hung up on Nile in a hurry. It slipped my mind to call her back. I imagine she’s going to be quite upset at me for awhile after this.” For the first time during their conversation Booker saw real emotion on Copley’s face. He looked gobsmacked. Deep lines furrowed his brow as took in the small pig, who was now rooting at Booker’s chest, looking for snuggles.   
“You got a house pig?”  
“Yeah, just for a bit of company. I’ve got a donkey, a goat, a dog, and five chickens in the barn truth be told. It’s nice to keep busy. Need to see them too, or do you believe me that all is well?”  
“Why didn't you pick up the phone when Nile or I called?”  
“Told you, I got quite drunk last night. Didn’t hear the calls and I must have let my phone die. I only plugged it in half an hour ago, just before my nap. Really Copley I’m okay, I’ll call Nile after this, smooth things over.”  
“Alright Booker. I’ll be calling a couple of times randomly this week and I'd like you to answer with the camera on within two rings or I will be sending someone up to check on you, alright?”  
“I guess. Send the team somewhere nice for me will you Copley. The Bahamas or maybe Hawaii. Andy loves Hawaii,” Booker hangs up and paces the kitchen. He set Bian down with a bowl of food before pacing again. He psyches himself up and then hits the call button for Nile.   
The line picks up halfway through the first ring.  
“Nile I fucked up… again but I promise you’ll like this reason more than the last one,” Booker started talking quickly, trying to keep his tone light.   
“Nile’s asleep,” The brusque but quiet male voice came over the phone and Booker’s phone nearly slipped from his fingers. He fumbled it for a second before clutching it tight with wooden fingers. Booker felt like he must be hallucinating. He felt like he was about to have a panic attack. This was the last voice he expected to hear today and in his darkest moments, didn’t believe he’d ever hear again. His mind rejected the identity of the caller at first but Booker remembered this voice better than he remembered his son’s. A voice that had laughed, teased, encouraged, and comforted him for centuries. A voice that when last heard had been shouting, filled with recrimination, anger, and betrayal. A voice that Booker was nowhere near ready to hear again, especially not today. Not when he was so broken, so low, and so very alone. A voice he wanted to hear so badly it ached inside his chest. The voice of his best friend who loved him the best, stayed with him the longest, and hated now his guts. Joe’s voice.


	7. Un Homme Avec Un But

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man with a purpose

Chapter Seven 

“Joe,” Booker’s voice comes out scratchy and hoarse. He inhales deeply and listens to the noisy bustle of airport background noise.   
From the very beginning, Joe had been Booker’s solid rock. The one to find him in Russia. The one who most closely enjoyed the same humour and hobbies. Andy was like the sun, all energy and warmth but he could never quite get close enough for fear of being burned to smithereens. Nicky was great, everyone loved Nicky because Nicky loved everyone. Booker and Nicky got along, were good friends but their personalities hadn’t quite clicked like he and Joe had. Nicky had had a certain reticence in befriending Booker to the same extent that Joe did. Andy had told him that Quynh had been closer to Nicky than Joe, that the two of them had been the original ‘bad ideas twins’. He and Joe had been the sequel. Sébastien had been a lonely child, bookish and shy, not one with a ton of close friends. In university he had chums but most of his time had been spent chasing Amélie. Amélie had been his first best friend and Joe his second. Though it was wildly different with Joe. First off he didn’t want to fuck Joe. Don’t get him wrong, Joe was a handsome man but Booker had only ever been dreadfully and boringly hetero, or so Andy had put it. It was different being friends with someone, wanting them close, enjoying them but not having that romantic intimacy that he and his wife had had. Joe just seemed to get him. Understood and appreciated him in a way that Booker was not ready for or even knew how to receive. He would find that he often questioned Joe’s intentions, second guessing why he would choose to spend time or effort on him. It led to a chasm between them that neither of them knew exactly how to bridge. It was terrifying and awe inspiring to have someone in his life whom he genuinely loved. He’d die for Joe in a heartbeat but he’d betrayed him instead.   
“Nile didn't sleep at all last night, no thanks to you. I take it you’re not in need of a rescue after all? I told Nile you’d probably just hit another bender and hadn’t bothered to call,” Joe’s voice sounded tight in a mixture of angry-sad. Booker felt the irrational desire to argue, even though it was the cover story he’d already come up with and told Copley. He hated disappointing Joe. Hated the bitterness, the sadness, and the resignation in his friend's voice. Though he'd been a drunk for more than a century and Joe had never turned him away. It was only when traitor had been added to his list of sins that he’d been cast out.  
“Yeah you know me,” Booker says, hating himself and trying not to sound bitter, not sure that he succeeds. “I’ve already explained everything to Copley. He’ll verify. No need to come to my rescue, I’m sorry I put you all out. Copley will rebook you guys tickets somewhere nice and vacationy I’m sure.”   
Joe didn’t say anything for several tense moments and Booker was worried he’d hang up and that that would be the end of their conversation. He both wanted this conversation over with and never wanted it to end.  
“Copley said you weren’t in Paris anymore. You haven’t been considering a trip out to Port Royal have you?” Joe’s voice sounds strange, like he’s masking anxiety. Booker pinches at the bridge of his nose and feels his chest tighten further. If Joe’s disdain had been painful, his worry is somehow worse. Booker’s sluggish thoughts linger on Port Royal. The team had come up with many codes and backup plans over the years. The team had specific locations set up in each of the continents in case of separation. When their cover was blown during an op they used the code “golden heist”. When they needed to leave a location fast they used the code “stage coach”. “Port Royal” was their code word for kidnapping, stemming from a mishap with pirates and too many opioids.   
“No, this time of year I’d have better luck at Figtree Cottage,” Booker responded with the all clear code word of one of their favourite safehouses in Northern Albania. “But I’m good where I am Joe. Paris was... painfully familiar and completely different in all the wrong ways. I just needed to get somewhere quiet for a bit.”   
Joe hummed in agreement, “It’s like that when I go to Cairo or Rabat. I miss them until I get there and realize the things I miss are gone.”  
The two of them sit in silence for nearly a minute. Booker could picture Joe sitting in the airport, looking over Nile while she sleeps, his eyes intense and his brow furrowed. He imagined Andy and Nicky had gone for food or a walk or something because either of them would have answered the phone if they’d been there rather than Joe. The weight of so much unsaid hurt and questions sits heavy in the silence between them, neither knowing how to even begin to unpack any of it but both desperately wanting to.   
“Nile told us last night that she hasn’t dreamed of Quynh in nearly 10 months now. She said you hadn’t either. She’s probably dead. With Andy and Quynh both losing their immortality so close together and then you not answering our calls... she feared that maybe you’d died too,” Joe let the silence hang for another half a minute before a heavy breath came over the line. Booker can imagine Joe deflating like a balloon, his shoulders dipping, heaving a giant sigh as he runs his hand through his hair, something he’s seen many times when Joe feels the weight of something or feels frustrated that something is outside his power to change, “Have we made a mistake? With Quynh gone, it’s only us now and Andy’s going to go soon. Every mission we go on, I can barely concentrate for fear of where Andy is. Is she safe, has anyone managed to sneak past us and hurt her? When we’re taking breaks between missions, Nicky and I can hardly sleep for worry over her, it’s only when she’s snoring in the same room with Nile and us do we actually sleep the night through. I can’t imagine life without her but she’s going to die. We’ve denied you the ability to protect her, to be with her before you will inevitably grieve her. We’ve denied you our protection as well. What if you truly had been harmed and we were half a world away, oblivious to it all. This isn’t right, we’re not meant to be alone.”   
Booker sits heavily at the table, rubbing his forehead. He stares at the broken painting on the ground and the deadbolt in the living room where Quynh used to chain him up. He feels so lonely in that moment that he can hardly stand it. The cold irony of what Joe feared being the reality of what Booker has suffered these past months without them sitting like a sharp icicle in his belly. That he was being taken apart piece by piece, by the woman they called family, while all of them were completely oblivious. Part of Booker is suddenly angry. He wants to shout, to tell Joe exactly what their punishment had done to him. Joe would be horrified. They’d rush over, and he’d have to tell the truth. That he’d been lying to them for months, that Quynh was back. That he hadn’t fought back, hadn’t used any of their code words with Nile, that he’d lied and let Quynh do as she willed. He’d let his apathy keep his family apart. That in the end he’d failed to help her. He couldn’t tell them. They’d never forgive him.   
Or he could just not tell them, meet them back in Paris and forget all about Quynh. It would be so easy to ask Joe to take him back. To agree with him, to convince him that this had been a mistake. If his time with Quynh has taught him anything, it’s that any company, even a woman who frequently uses his screams to drown out the sound of her own demons, is preferable to being alone. With Quynh gone, he’s alone once again. He could lie by omission, just not tell them about Quynh at all, let them think she’d drowned at the bottom of the ocean.  
He has his mouth open, ready to say the words to have them bring him back. Tears have gathered in his eyes and he blinks to clear them and they once again focus on the living room, on the noose and the empty bottles. He’d been selfish for years and it’d nearly cost him everything in the end. He’d hid so much from his friends, keeping his cards so close to his chest he forgot what was on them and when he’d laid them down he hadn’t recognized the man he’d become. He remembers the terror of realizing the bullet he put in Andy wasn’t healing up. The smell of metal implements and coppery blood in the room where Joe and Nicky were tied up, unable to reach each other but forced to watch as pieces were carved from their beloved. He remembers seeing Nile, bullet wounds littering her body as she burst into the lab to save them. She was so young, so innocent. He’d been the cause of each of those injuries. He firms his jaw and pushes everything he’s feeling up into a tight ball inside himself. Right now he would be nothing but a burden. He remembers Nile’s words then, they deserved space and time to heal. He couldn’t undo what had been done, couldn’t change the past but he could give them that at least, the chance to heal. He wants to be with them so badly it aches inside him like a physical wound but the thought of going back too soon and harming them as a result was inconceivable.  
“No Joe, you didn’t make a mistake. I did what I did and I deserve what I’ve been given. I know you’ll take care of Andy, she’s better off with me gone,” Joe clucks his tongue in disagreement when Booker says the last bit, but Booker presses on, “Joe, you all deserve the time to heal from what I’ve done. If I come back too soon, it’ll be worse on all of us. I’ve already said my goodbyes to Andy and the rest of us, we have time.”   
Booker hears Joe heave in another deep breath, “Glad you’re not dead Basti,” and with that Joe hangs up. Booker is frozen for all of ten seconds before everything he had been keeping deep down inside himself comes bubbling up like a geyser. Quynh abandoning him, the failed suicide attempt, the loneliness, the anger, Joe. He just shut the door on the one thing that he’s been desperate for for nearly a year, a reunion with the only people on this earth he has anymore.  
He suppresses a sound suspiciously close to a sob and bends at the waist, taking deep breaths. His eyes are unfocused and he can hear his heartbeat, fast and loud in his ears. It all suddenly feels like too much. He pushes back his chair with a clatter, scaring Bian who runs for cover under the table. He feels like the walls are closing in, like if he doesn’t leave right now he’ll get stuck in the floor and never move again. He stumbles out of the cabin and just starts walking. He doesn’t know what direction, nor does he care. Soon the walking turns to running. He needs to feel the burn in his lungs and he runs until his legs quiver with fatigue. Eventually he can’t run anymore and he half sits, half collapses in the middle of the forest. He doesn’t scream into the wide nothingness of the wilderness, he's not that much of a cliche, even if he desperately wants to. Instead he sits on the mossy earth and clutches at his hair, doing nothing and thinks of nothing. All he does is breath.  
Eventually he realizes that he left his phone in the cabin and if Nile or Copley try to call again and he doesn’t answer, he won’t be able to talk them down from checking in on him. He also realizes that he hadn’t grabbed his shoes on the way out, or a jacket. His feet are a bloody mess from his run in the woods. He checks them over but they’ve healed already and he wipes the blood away. He’s starting to feel cold seep into his bare feet and Jean clad behind from the earth beneath him. He’s unbelievably glad he stayed on the trail, so he’s able to jog his way back to the cabin without getting lost. By now the sun is starting to set and the cool of evening is beginning to set in.   
When he gets within sight of his cabin darkness has taken over. He stops when he looks up, frozen in his tracks. The lights are on. He never leaves the lights on during the day. He sneaks around the front and peaks into the kitchen window. Quynh is sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of tea in front of her and a cup in her hands. She’s got another cup in front of the empty chair across from her.   
Booker opens the front door and Quynh startles, spilling some of the tea. She hisses and grabs a tablecloth to sop it up. Booker mutters an apology for startling her and takes his place in the chair opposite. He grabs the empty tea cup and fills it. He then tops off Quynh’s cup. She thanks him quietly and then the two of them sit in silence and drink. The silence isn’t comfortable this time.   
“The team thinks you're dead,” Booker breaks the quiet, not looking up from his cup but sees from his periphery Quynh flinch again. She looks up at him with dark eyes.  
“Oh, I guess that would be the natural conclusion to no dreams, wouldn't it.”  
She waits a beat before asking, “Did you hang yourself in the living room?”  
“You were gone. I thought you’d left for good,” Booker stares at the noose, still hanging in the room beyond Quynh’s shoulder.  
“So you tried to kill yourself? With a noose,” Quynh says the word noose through her teeth, like she’s saying a bad word.   
“I didn’t want to be alone,” Booker shrugs and watches the noose sway gently from the wind of an open window.   
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just left this morning without saying anything but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I needed to get away for a bit. Part of me wanted to leave forever. Part of me doesn’t think that we can get better together. My damage causes me to want to harm and your’s causes you to want to be harmed. I’m abusive and I don’t want this to sound like I think you deserve it but you purposely egg me on.”  
“I do. To protect the animals. I know it would hurt you to hurt them, but I heal. It isn’t a big deal.” Quynh’s cup slams onto the table, tea splashing around and Booker finally looks at her. Her eyes have filled with tears that slip silently down her cheeks as she stares at him.   
“No Booker, stop lying to yourself. I realized it the time I tried to give you the pillow to sit on. You were fine as long as I was degrading and hurting you but the moment I try to make you comfortable, you act up. You wind me up and place yourself in my destructive path. You want me to punish you but hurting you, does hurt me. Just because you heal, doesn’t make it okay or an acceptable thing to do. Booker you don’t deserve pain. I know you don’t believe that but I do and everytime I hurt you… I want to leave and never come back but that would also be hurting you,” Quynh eyes the noose as she says the last part.  
Booker stares at the empty spot on the wall, where Quynh’s painting used to be and feels so much regret. He thinks back to his conversation with Joe and all the times he’d shut him out when he’d asked to be let in and where that had gotten them at the end. More than he wants to stay silent and pretend this day hadn't happened he wants Quynh to stay. He doesn’t want to be alone.  
“You were right before. None of the others had ever seen it, or at least never confronted me on it but you saw it, saw me. I betrayed my family. I deserve torment for that betrayal. I know it’s not healthy, I know it doesn’t work but it’s where I go. I find myself laughing, happy, or even just content for even a moment and immediately feel guilty. Every moment of life that I live without them is a moment I feel as if I had stolen from them. Every gift from Nicky, every hug from Joe, every laugh with Nile, every moment of love from Andy. They deserve to have this, not me. Amélie was the most amazing person to ever live. Idealistic, compassionate, intelligent. She would have taken this gift and really made it into something. She would have saved thousands. And my boys, they all died too young. They didn’t even get the chance to live let alone the opportunity to change the world and with a mother like Amélie they would have. I was a criminal, a drunk, and a disappointment. I didn’t deserve this, I don’t deserve this life.” Quynh reaches over and takes his hand, squeezing gently.  
“Your suffering doesn’t make anything better, trust me. The more I hurt you, the worse I felt. It was only compounding my guilt and yours. It only makes those around you miserable. The end with your family wasn’t your fault. You can’t keep perpetuating the abuse in your life because that’s what it was. Blaming, hating, and hurting you for something that is entirely out of your control is abuse. Amélie wouldn’t want that for you. She’d want you to live to your fullest potential because that is what all good partners want for their spouses. It’s time to heal Sébastien.”  
Booker’s breath stutter starts as he takes a deep breath in. He rubs his eyes tiredly. He’s just so tired.   
“You’ve been torturing me for 200 years. Every dream that I had of you was living torment.”  
“I didn’t want to be. I didn’t have a choice.”  
“I know Quynh. I don’t blame you. The pathetic thing is I don’t know what to do with a life without you torturing me anymore. If you quit torturing me and I’m still fucked up, then it was me all along wasn’t it.”  
“You know that when you joined the team, for the first time in centuries I didn’t feel as alone as I was. I got to see the sky again through your eyes. I got to see my family again, my love and my little brothers. I got to see Yusuf laugh through your eyes, you always were good at making him laugh. I got to see Nicolo’’s eye’s sparkle with mischief again. He and I were the best at pranking the others, we’d get into such trouble. I got to talk to Andy again. You two would talk for hours and drink and just be together. I missed her so much. It was all so overwhelming. I was so bitterly jealous of you but so incredibly thankful. I, in equal measure, loved and hated you for that. You got to have what I so desperately wanted but you shared a piece of it with me. I know you lost your family and nothing will ever replace them but you have us. I know the others care for you, even if you spent decades deceiving yourself of that notion. Like I said before, Andy doesn’t have a lot of time left, and I’d like to get better for her before she goes but I want that for you too. I want her to be able to pass peacefully, not worried about us. So I’ll stay here with you till we can both confidently say we’re getting better. But it needs to be both of us. No more hiding Booker, no more punishing yourself. We need to do better, both of us. Good enough at least to be around the others again without hurting them,” Quynh squeezes his hand and doesn’t say anything for a moment.  
“I don’t want to hurt you anymore Booker. Please, don’t use me as your whipping post. I want us to be family.”   
“I want that too Quynh.”


	8. Mets Du Piment Dans Ta Vie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spice Up Your Life

Chapter Eight

He tells Quynh about his talk with Copley. He warns her that if his phone rings she needs to leave the room as quickly as possible so as not to be seen. Quynh doesn’t say anything as he recounts what happened with Joe but she does top off the tea in his cup. She’s made some lavender tea and it’s scent has a calming effect on his shot nerves. The last couple days were a lot to handle, especially considering that Booker polished off their meagre supply of booze. Nothing to dull the edge of panic and accumulating guilt but if he’s going to keep his word to Quynh then it’s probably for the better. Booze never made him better, just numb.   
He cleans up the bottles from the living room and removes the noose. It leaves a faint mark where the paint had been rubbed off on the support beam. When he comes back into the kitchen Quynh has gathered the pieces of her broken painting and has it laid out on the table.  
“I’m sorry about that. We might be able to salvage it,” Booker says chastened and feeling ashamed of himself. Quynh pulls away the broken frame and the canvas comes free. Despite his hope the paint on the canvas is cracked and parts of it have ripped.   
“I forgive you Booker. It gives me the opportunity to try again,” Quynh says with a small smile. She rolls up the cracked canvas and brings it to her room.   
They deduce together that Copley might have questions if he sees the blood stained floors or the deadbolted chain and collar in the basement so they decide to move Booker’s bed up to the second bedroom on the main floor. They move the cot and the few belongings that he has, including his pile of work clothes that they had picked up from the second hand store back when they had been getting supplies, up to the bedroom before they both head to bed. They’re both exhausted in a way that neither of them have felt in a long while. Quynh had finished up the chores while Booker had been out in the woods so they don’t have to worry about the animals. Booker finds his sleep uneasily that night, the highly emotional nature of the day and the new room keeping him on edge.  
He’s awoken by his phone ringing at 5 the next morning. He scrambles over to where it’s plugged in and, seeing Copley’s number, answers it on video chat mode.   
“Jesus Christ Copley. Really? This is going to get old real fast if this is going to be your check up time,” Booker mumbles out, barely awake.   
“Good morning to you, too sunshine. Could you give me a look around the room you're in? Nile asked me to make sure you got an early start on the day, for retaliation. She also told me to inform you that she demands photos of your animals.”  
“Yeah, alright. Anything else?” Booker asks as he leans back against the wall and flips the camera screen so he can show Copley his room. He’s mildly embarrassed by the state of it. It’s depressingly bare, with only a cot and his clothes folded on the floor in the corner but then he remembers he doesn't really care what Copley thinks of him.  
“No that’s all for now. Talk to you soon Booker.” The call cuts off and Booker flops over on the floor. He’s exhausted but he’s awake now. He lies on the floor for a couple of minutes, indulging in some self pity before he gets up and goes to the barn. The animals bleat, caw, and bark in greeting, happy to see him. He greets them all with pets and snuggles before getting to work. He snaps photos of them all, making sure to get some with Chi sleeping with the chicks.   
When he’s done he goes back inside and gets an early start on breakfast. It feels like a simple but hearty kind of day so Booker gets starting on making chai oatmeal for the two of them. As the oatmeal cooks he sends Nile the photos as well as the names of his animals. On an impulse he copies the message and forwards it to Joe and Andy as well. He immediately regrets it and goes to delete them but gets an answer from both of them too quickly. Andy sends the heart emoji back and Joe texts him calling the chicks the Spice Chicks and told him to expect a special gift from Nicky in his next package. Booker shuddered to think what it could be. The Spice Girls have long been a topic of conflict among their small team. Nicky had gone through a phase in the early 2000s which had nearly been the end of the team's sanity. Nicky had become obsessed with the Spice Girls, Aqua, NSYNC, the Pussycat Dolls, and all other such pop anthems, playing his homemade cassettes of recorded songs whenever possible. He’d play them on their road trips, when he was cleaning or cooking, he even took them along on stake outs. Andy had an extraordinary ability to zone out any noise she deemed obnoxious and even she had hit her limit at the seventh run through of Populicious Playlist #2 and went out and bought herself a pair of soundproof earplugs. Joe hated pop. There was just something about the genre that grated on the man. Joe and Nicky had a marriage that the poets could only dream to write about. The depth of dedication, love, and adoration the pair had for one another was the stuff of legends. It wasn’t always roses and wine, the two of them went through phases of sickeningly sweet and grumpy old married couple throughout the years Booker knew them but those years had been a whole new level of bickering. Every car ride was nearly World War 3 with the two of them swatting each other's hands away from the cassette player or on a very notable occasion, Nicky threatening to jump out of the car after Joe had thrown his Nicky’s Poptacular Playlist #4 cassette out the window. Booker had resolutely stayed neutral throughout the war. He hated the music as much as the other two but he loved watching Nicky grin and bob his head, slightly off beat to the ridiculous tunes. He loved watching Joe rail and grump, knowing that all the bickering came from a place of true affection. As much as Andy usually tuned out or put in her headphones, she would always sing along to Barbie Girl when it came on. It was familial and fun. It was the kind of torture that you put your loved ones through because you love winding them up. Booker swears to himself that the day Quynh is reunited with the group he’ll go find those cassettes for her. Joe and Andy may never forgive him for it, but it’ll be worth it. 

Eventually Quynh wakes up and Booker’s trip down memory lane is halted. They eat breakfast together and in due course they start to discuss what to do next. They both agree that their last couple months had been, mostly a success except for a few outlier events. Booker agrees to stop letting Quynh hurt him. She makes him promise to try to get away or fight back if she goes manic.   
“I also think that you need to get out at least a couple times a week. It would be good for you to make some connections outside of just me and the animals,” Quynh says after swallowing a mouthful of porridge and Booker scrunches his nose at her. He loathes the idea even if he can see the validity of it. It’s time for him to start connecting with humanity again.  
They go online and find a few different groups and get togethers. He feels extremely uninspired to do any of them but eventually chooses two that he is at least familiar with. They send some emails and soon Booker is signed up for a Ukulele club which meets Tuesday nights at one of the local pubs and a knitting club which meets at an old catholic church on Friday mornings. The plan is for Quynh to eventually start going to her own groups but they decide to give it some more time before she tries.   
They go back to their old routine. Copley continues his calls as promised. One notable occasion Quynh is in the vicinity and Booker has to keep a straight face when answering the phone after just watching Quynh run full tilt and dive behind the open door and into the barn. She emerged after the call, hay in her hair and a suspicious stain on her jacket. Booker fails to keep from laughing at that and she slings mud at him. The team continues to press him for pictures of his brood of animals. Nicky, through Joe, has taken particular interest in the Spice Chicks and demands regular updates. A few weeks after the first picture Quynh takes the truck up to Paris on the weekend and picks up the package from Nicky. Inside are five tiny Spice girl wigs and little novelty items for each of them. They look like they had been stripped from barbies or some other kind of doll. Sebastien and Quynh spend a few hours doing a photo shoot of each of the chicks with the wigs and items. It’s ridiculous and Quynh laughs so hard she gets sore ribs. Booker’s own cheeks ache from his smiling too much. He sends the pictures and gets a short reaction video of the team going through the photos. It must be Nile’s video because Andy, Nicki, and Joe are all crammed on a tiny couch contorted in laughter. 

When the first Tuesday arrives Booker nervously clambers into the truck and makes his way to town for the first time on his own. Quynh hasn’t tied him up at night since she came back but this is a whole new level of trust between the two of them. Booker doesn’t even entertain the idea of leaving her, he has nowhere to go.   
Booker goes to a music shop and purchases a mahogany concert ukulele with a sun accent around the centre and wind accents up the rosewood neck. He’d learned how to play years ago on some down time the team had done in Hawaii. The group he meets at the tavern are all over 60 and ecstatic to have a young man join their group. They all have the same app on their ipads and an elderly scottish woman named Agnes insists on sharing hers with Sebastien. He is competent but it’s difficult at times keeping up with the songs he is unfamiliar with but the group is encouraging and patient. They stop after an hour and half for a 30 minute break where some of the older men buy him a pint and question him. He tells them he’s new to the area, a widower from Paris who needed a new scene. They empathize and then drill him on the details of his farm. Eventually they head back in and finish their time off together. All in all the experience is a bit chaotic but cheery and fun. Booker doesn’t think he’s had fun in years. He returns to Quynh that night and tells her all about the group.   
The Friday knitting club is somewhat similar in certain respects. Once again all of the patrons are elderly but he is the only man in attendance. The women coo and affectionately pinch his cheeks when he arrives, telling him what a sweet soul he is to join their efforts to make blankets for the poor. Booker had learned to knit from Joe back in the early days on one of their boat rides over to America. There hadn’t been much to do besides read, drink, and pace the same patch of deck and Booker had been going out of his mind. Joe had dragged him from the deck one day to his and Nicky’s bunk room and taught him to knit a scarf. Booker had enjoyed it immensely; he found it relaxing and engaging. It also filled him with nostalgia, remembering all the times Amelie had sat by the fire, watching her family as she had crocheted or sewed. The ladies in the club were far more proficient than he but they didn’t mock his simple knots. They sat around and gossiped together, updating each other on their children and grandchildren, on the latest news from the congregation, and all manner of going ons from their city. Once again he was asked his background and he repeated his story for them. They all hummed in sympathy at the passing of his wife and the nearest lady, a grey haired Bosnian woman named Lucija patted his hand sympathetically.   
So Booker had a gaggle of new friends. All of them were hilariously younger than he but none of them knew that and they treated him as a young grieving widower who needed the guidance and care of his elders. The men at the Ukulele club invite him to drink with them and they start vicious card games during the breaks. The ladies at the quilting club often brought meals or treats for him to bring home. They never pushed for him to speak but eventually they pull him into their conversations. It felt good to talk to people who had no expectation or knowledge of him. He could just be himself, even if he didn’t exactly know who that was at the moment. He struck up a particular friendship with Lucija. She’d been a Bosnian refugee from the conflict in the early nineties and had been in France since she’d escaped in ‘94. The team had been in the country during that time. It’d been a fucked up situation. War was never simple but the lines of who side they should be on in that conflict had been constantly changing, blurred and messy. Mostly they just tried to help the civilians wherever they could, though it never felt like they were doing enough. It’d been a particularly difficult time for Joe and Nicky, the two of them watching the ghost of their own conflict from centuries ago but this time with bombs and machine guns. Naida’s french was heavily accented and she’d been ecstatic when Booker had spoken to her in Bosnian. She was a fierce woman, like most eastern European grandmothers, and had a dark humor that surprised and delighted Booker. He’d taken to showing up early on Fridays’ so he could do tea with Lucija before their meetings.

Things are going well. Surprisingly well. Booker keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop but it doesn’t. The meetings continue to be pleasant human interaction to break up his week. He and Quynh and the animals are getting along famously. He still gets depressed and has his bad days, where the guilt feels overwhelming. Mostly on those days he cuddles on the couch with Bian while Quynh makes him tea. She’ll sit with him and listen if he wants to talk or sit just rub his shoulders if he doesn’t. Quynh still has nights where she wakes up pounding on the wall and screaming. Booker will take her outside and they’ll go for a walk in the forest.   
Before they know it, it’s Christmas Eve and they decide to both go attend Mass in Grenoble. Booker is introduced to Lucija’s husband, two sons, her daughter, and her six grandchildren. She is ecstatic to meet his oft talked about sister in law, pinching Quynh’s cheek and telling her what an amazing woman she is for helping her brother in law through this tough time. Quynh looks a bit like a deer in the headlights but is polite and courteous. They go to Mass together, taking up a row together. They enjoy the songs and the quiet peace of the service. Afterwards after meeting some of the other ladies from the knitting club and saying their farewells Quynh and Booker drive around Grenoble till the wee hours of the night, taking in the Christmas lights.   
The next morning Booker and Quynh exchange small gifts. Quynh gets him a new painting, the same pink and blue mess that he’d destroyed months before. Booker gifts her with Nicky’s old cassette Populicious Playlist #3. He’d messaged Nicky the month before and asked Nicky to send it. Nicky had also sent him a second package with the instruction not to open till Christmas morning. They open it after exchanging gifts. Inside is a framed drawing of each of Booker’s animals with a different hat or bow tie, signed by Joe and Nile. It was clearly Joe’s work but must have been Nile’s idea. There’s also a few sets of novelty christmas socks that Quynh delightedly takes to her room that are decidedly from Nicky. The final item in the box is a gorgeous Stiletto knife with a bone handle that has Andy written all over it.  
In January Quynh starts to join him on Fridays for knitting club. The ladies love her and dote on her with the same exuberance as Booker. Booker’s Ukulele club does a concert at a small community hall and Quynh attends with Lucija and a couple of the other ladies from the knitting club.  
Soon it’s April and Spring is in full swing. The two of them had decided during the long winter months to plant a garden this year and as the snow melts they get planting. The Spice Chicks have turned into chickens and started to lay eggs. Roi-Soleil, the goat, is big enough now that it’s not cute when she rams them anymore but she has become kind of like a support animal for Alonso, keeping him calm when she’s around. Everything is peaceful and serene, their little farm brimming with new life. The two of them are starting to feel almost ready to meet up with the team again.   
It’s mid afternoon on a Saturday and Booker is curled up by the fire with a steaming cup of white elderflower tea. Quynh had taken the truck out that morning to bring Bian in to the vet for a check up and to be spayed. He isn’t expecting her back until after dinner. He’s got the latest book from Nicky out in front of him. It’s Rhythms of Renewal by Rebekkah Lyons. He’s nearly halfway through when the window behind him shatters, and the peace they had so carefully curated shatters with it. He knew his luck had to run out sooner or later.


	9. Un Ennemi le Plus Odieux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Enemy Most Foul

Chapter Nine

Booker awakens to an all to familiar feeling of aching joints and ropes around his wrists. He loses his place in time for a moment, expecting to feel the leather bite of his collar around his neck and to see Quynh standing over him with some implement of torture or another. Instead he feels nothing around his neck and when he tries to open his eyes it’s to the scratchy feeling of cloth wrapped around his head, of which he can’t see through. He also realizes in short order that his hands, while tied, are hoisted up above his head, secured to something above him and all of his body weight is dangling from them. “Ow,” he thinks distantly to himself, getting his feet under himself to release some of the weight. He feels groggy and unfocused and it takes him a minute to remember what had happened.   
He’d been at home, waiting for Quynh to get back from town, when someone had tossed a canister of military grade pepper spray through his window. Even though he’d been immediately blinded, coughing and crying as his eyes tried to fight the irritant, he’d dropped to the ground in front of the couch, putting it between him and the broken window. He’d been aware that people were coming in after the canister, he could hear the sound of two sets of boots connecting solidly with the floor. He and Quynh had most of their weapons stored in the basement to keep them out of hand for when Quynh had her bad days but Booker had the Stiletto knife from Andy on the mantle by the fireplace. He’d tossed his mug in the direction he’d heard the boots and was satisfied to hear a clear clunk and some swearing. He’d then used the distraction to scramble to the mantle blindly, desperately grasping, knocking over the framed picture from Joe and Nile, causing it to shatter on the ground. He grasped the handle of the knife just as someone came up behind him and attempted to grapple him. Booker had dropped like dead weight and the attacker lost their hold on him. He lashed out with the knife then, flipping it open and slashing wildly at what he hoped would be the approximate location of his attacker. He knew he had guessed right when he felt the hot spray of blood across his face. He’d pushed the screaming man backwards, catching the second with the sudden weight of his injured fellow, he could hear their swearing and falling, and twisted away towards the back of the room where the second window was. He hadn’t been able to see through the pain and the tears as his eyes tried to flush the pepper spray but he knew the layout of his home. He had found the back window and took a few steps back before throwing himself forward and through it. Glass got caught up in his clothes, and tore through his skin. He rolled when he hit the ground and then hugged the back of the house just under and to the side of the broken window, forcing his eyes open through the pain. Moments later the second attacker had come through after him. Booker had barely made out tactical gear and boots before he’d sliced through their achilles tendon as they landed. The man screamed out in pain and went down heavily. He was wearing a heavy duty full face gas mask which had given them the benefit of sight, however much that had helped them. Booker sprung on his back and got a hand on his forehead. Pulling back hard on his head, Booker slipped the knife into the opening between the helmet and the bullet proof vest, deep into the side of his neck. Arterial spray had burst out as he withdrew the knife, sliding it back and forth before out, soaking his leg in blood. The man gurgled and went still as Booker quickly patted down the body. He had just got his hands on the man’s gun when he felt the prongs of a taser shoot into his back. He’d had barely half a second of realization before he’d been incapacitated by 50,000 volts of electricty. His body had spasmed and he lost his grip on the gun. Three bodies pile on top of him, kicking the gun and taking the knife. Booker had yelled and fought for all he was worth but he wasn’t able to wriggle free. He’d felt the sudden twinge of a needle in the side of his neck and his vision had blurred and darkened. 

He curses himself now at his stupidity. He should have known that they would have sent another team around back, he should have been expecting them. He’s been inactive for too long, letting his time away from action dull his senses.   
He listens carefully to the sounds around him trying to place himself. He can hear an electronic buzzing from overhead, probably industrial lights and the squawk of a seagull comes faintly from what he assumes must be outside. He pulls at his hands, testing his bonds. They’re firmly tied, his hands are completely numb and his shoulders ache at the action. That’s also when he notices a sharp pinch in his arm. He wiggles it experimentally and feels a small plastic tube hit his arm. Well that explained the cotton mouth and groggy brain. He tries to use the side of his forearm to force the blindfold off but it’s too well tied.   
“Fuck,” Booker exclaims quietly, he hates competent kidnappers. Whoever his captors were, they were professionals. He’s been effectively tied, blinded, and they’ve got a IV line in his arm pumping him full of some kind of incapacitating drug. He waits an indeterminate amount of time before he finally slips back into unconsciousness lulled by the drugs.   
He comes awake to a bucket full of cold, foul smelling water hitting him full in the chest and face. He sputters and swears, colourfully and in many languages. He still feels groggy and now nauseous. He also feels super high. They’ve changed up whatever drugs they were giving him. He doesn’t feel lulled or dopey anymore. He feels loose, almost weightless in his bonds. He can taste the sound of boots against the ground as people shift and move around him. He can see sparks of brightly coloured lights behind his closed eyelids. Someone hits him in the kidney and he bites his cheek to hold back a cry. Then the blindfold is being ripped from his head, along with some hair.   
“Fucking ow! You pissheads are going to severely regret this,” Booker decides to come out swinging, with words because he desperately wants to with fists but can’t. He’s just getting over his desperate need to be punished, only to be pushed into another situation of kidnapping and torture and Booker is indescrimatly pissed at this. His words quiver and judder through the air like crashing waves and he’s almost distracted, but not quite, from his rage. He determines to bite the first thing that gets into his range, though he can hardly keep his focus, whatever drugs they’ve got him on are strong. His eyes adjust to the light and he sees two men in the same tactical gear as the ones at his house, sans masks. Their uncovered faces go in and out of focus, slowly distorting and twisting before going back to normal. He slowly blinks and looks around the room. It seems to be some kind of industrial warehouse. With the sound of the seagull and the smell of salt water on the men in front of him his best guess is that they’ve moved him somewhere near the coast. He glances down and notices for the first time that he’s also shirtless. There’s smudges of blood along his healed skin and his pants have long streaks of nearly dried blood. There’s also a puddle of coagulated blood below him. What had they done to him while he’d been unconscious?   
“Where are the others?” the one in the front asks in English and Booker honestly cannot believe what he is hearing. He’s a big man with a severe scar from chin to nose, downturning his mouth and making him look perpetually like someone had pissed in his Cheerios. Booker feels once again as if he’s back in the basement with Quynh, can almost see it superimposed over his present reality. He feels like he’s lost his grip on his sanity. He starts to laugh like a madman. Deep, crazed guffaws that sound twisted and hollow, even to his own ears. He can see his laughter in the air. It spirals out from him in big ugly swirls of green and orange and tastes like ashe and sulfur. He laughs till he has tears in his eyes. He laughs till the man in front of him motions to the one on his left and he is punched in the solar plexus. The air immediately leaves his lungs, leaving him gasping for breath. He stops laughing finally, coughing as the swirls of colour fade out into the room. He watches them go before turning his eyes back, staring at the duo in front of him. Well this is either a sick joke or he’s in deep shit. Either way Booker’s going to play this the same way.   
“Fuck off,” Booker follows this up with a gob of spit which spatters across the leaders chest. He gets another punch from the dude on the left for that. This time it’s between the legs and that's just mean. Booker coughs and then pukes. He catches the front of his blood stained pants and his boots, the puke joining the blood on the ground. He really hates these guys. He starts to laugh again, the spirals returning but they’re blue and black this time, tasting like salt and brine. He’s just so tired. Tired of this situation, tired from the drugs, just all around tired of this bullshit. The leader looks angry, the other slightly disquieted, though it’s hard to tell emotions on faces that keep shifting.   
“Where are..?” Scarface asks again and Booker cuts him off. The man’s voice smells like blood and viscera and Booker detests it. He’s not used to tasting, seeing, and smelling sounds and he’s not liking it. He’s aware his brain is all messed up on the drugs they’ve give him and he’s glad he knows nothing about the team. He isn’t sure he's going to be able to stop talking, his brain to mouth filter seems to have gone as wacky as his senses. He’s having a hard time looking at the faces in front of him as they keep blurring and morphing so he stares at what he thinks is the leader's forehead.  
“You don’t get it. There is nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done by hands far more skilled and cruel. I’ve died a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand different ways. I don’t care about your evil monologue. I don’t care how you found me, what my team did to you, or what you plan to do to me. It doesn’t matter. You’ll do what you’re gonna do, I won’t say shit, and eventually we’ll get so sick and tired of each other that you’ll just let me go. Because the truth is, I don’t know jackshit. Why would the man living in the middle of fucking nowhere France know anything. I’ve clearly been abandoned, tossed out. You got the wrong hostage man. So once again and this time with feeling. Fuck. Off.”   
“The doctor must have given this guy too much. He’s supposed to be uninhibited enough to tell the truth but he’s clearly delusional. Matthews, sober him up.” Scarface tells the man on the left and his voice has static dancing through the air.  
The angry blob man on the left comes forward again to hit him or maybe to pull out his IV but gets just slightly too close. It’s hard for Booker to tell what’s real, one eye far too large and the other sliding down his cheek with sparks of colours shooting out of both but he makes an educated guess and lunges forward. He snaps his teeth shut and tears back with a mouth full of skin and blood. The man shrieks back, holding his face. Booker contemplates chewing, just to really freak these guys out but has a moment of sobriety and decides that no, he doesn’t want to chew the human flesh in his mouth. He spits it out at them instead and then continues laughing.   
Booker’s dealt with hired professionals before. They’re a hard lot to rattle. These two look like they just met the antichrist. They bustle out, the man who Booker had bit giving him looks of apprehension over their shoulders, like he might be coming after them despite his bonds. He laughs louder and the air shimmers in brightly coloured whirls. 

Eventually whatever psychoactive drug they’d pumped him full of wears off. He’s supremely glad to be sober once again. With the absence of his high he’s suddenly and keenly worried. Quynh and Bian hadn’t been on the property when he’d been taken but all the other animals had. Booker doesn't think they’d be cruel enough to deliberately go into the barn and harm the animals inside but he wouldn’t put it past them. He’s also a little perturbed that high Booker hadn’t asked any questions. He would really like to know why he’d been taken and what his team had done to piss people off so much as to kidnap some nobody in the french alps to get at them. He’d been taken on a Saturday and presuming it hasn’t been longer than a day so he’s got approximately two days left before he’ll miss his phone call with Nile and the team will realize something is wrong. That leaves his immediate rescue team down to Quynh. Booker knows Quynh is a fierce and competent warrior. He also knows that she was able to track, stalk, and orchestrate a run in with Nile and kidnap him without any of the others or Copley being the wiser. But she’d also had the benefit of dreams during that time to help in finding both he and Nile. That benefit is no longer theirs to take advantage of. Finding him at whatever port side warehouse they had him sequestered away in was going to be a difficult task, especially considering their meagre setup at the cabin, not to mention he doesn't know how many people they’re got here keeping him hostage. Eventually fatigue sets in and Booker succumbs, despite his anxiety, to sleep.

After some time Booker is once again woken from a light doze. This time it's to the sound of a pair of heels walking across the cement floor. Booker looks back over his shoulder towards the door and is somehow not surprised to see the doctor from Merrick’s lab pulling a wheeled cooler behind her. “Fuck…” Booker turns away from her and closes his eyes. “Just when I thought this day could not have gotten worse. What the hell are you doing here? Weren’t you blacklisted and arrested after our last tryst?”  
Dr. Meta Kozak steps up into his eyeline. She eyes the chunk of flesh on the ground with a sour expression and lightly kicks it aside with the toe of her shoe. She then turns her eyes to him, a saccharine smile plastered on her face. She looks much the same as the last time he’d seen her. She has on semi formal clothes under a white lab coat and has a clipboard and pen tucked up under her arm. Something glass clinks in her coat as she puts her hands in her pockets.  
After Merrick’s lab Copley had been thorough. Scrubbing out all evidence of their existence and making sure that everyone who had been involved were either dead or neutralized. From what Booker had heard, Dr. Kozak had been linked to several unethical human testing sites. She’d lost her medical license and was awaiting trial.   
“Hello Booker, it’s an honour to make your acquaintance once again,” She says with a look of disapproval, like he was a rude school child, not greeting the teacher as they arrived for class. Booker really didn’t like this woman. He stared at her quietly, waiting for his questions to be answered. She rolls her eyes at his stubborn silence and continues, “I made bail and went underground. A woman such as myself is in high demand in certain circles. Circles that will keep me firmly out of the purview of the law. I really should thank you and your friends. The pharmaceutical arena was interesting but the criminal has afforded me opportunities of study I had never dreamed of.” As she talks she steps forward and carefully, making sure she isn’t in his bite range, checks the bag of liquids still hooked into his arm. It’s nearly empty and she writes something on her clipboard before opening the cooler. The lid blocks his view but Booker can hear her moving what sounds like plastic bags and glass bottles around. She comes back out with a new IV bag and moves around the side to replace the old one. Booker watches patiently, waiting for any opportunity to do her harm. She doesn’t get close enough for him to bit but she is close enough for him to smell. She smells the same and it reminds of the lab and the rows of carefully extracted specimens lined up, taken from Joe and Nicky. Joe was all passion, always has been. He burns bright and hot in his moods. Nicky though has always been harder to read. Outwardly calmer and more reserved, more in control. He remembers the carefully crafted looks of rage and concern on their respective faces, masking the fear, pain, and defeat. He was responsible for putting his two friends in those binds and on those medical beds but Dr. Kovak, she was responsible for the harm that was done to them there. He’s known conflicted people, complicated people, brainwashed people but he knows evil when he sees it. This woman wasn’t a doctor in temperament, she was a sadist. What she had done to his friends in that lab, all of it was designed for torture. How she’d set them up, they didn’t need to be in the same room. Most labs would have kept them separate to make sure none of the samples were contaminated. She’d set them up specifically, so close as to see but not close enough to touch, to add to their helplessness. She’d also not used anesthetic, purposely and again against normal scientific method. It’s make harder to get good samples from struggling victims, much cleaner for them to be unconscious or unfeeling. She liked to watch the pain. Amplify the terror and the helplessness. Booker owed her a debt, on behalf of two people who would never ask for him to collect but who he nevertheless owes a great sum to.  
While she finishes with the IV, she continues to say, “Oh don’t worry, you and your friends are still my favourites. I kept looking for all of you but you’re a tricky lot to locate and even more to keep apparently. Imagine my delight then when I hear from my new employer last month rumors of an associate of his and their recent run-ins with a pesky band of unkillable warriors. I absolutely insisted on being lent out to this dear associate so I could help them with their little problem. It seems your team pissed off the wrong people. I may have pointed them in the direction of a certain former CIA agent. Copley’s a slippery one but we finally got a pinpoint on him. They didn’t get him, the incompent fuckers. Turns out he had a backdoor squirrelled away but what delicious tidbits we found at his home, one of which lead us to your cozy backwoods cottage. It’s taken me a year but I finally have you back and we didn’t get very far last time you and me but what wonders we’ll have in store for us this time.”  
“Well thank you for your psychotic monologue but I don’t know where the others are,” Booker says after a few moments of dead air. He doesn’t like the way she eyes him, like something caught in a trap.  
“Oh don’t worry, I don’t need your cooperation for that. These idiots I’m working with are the ones who were obsessed with finding them all. I’ve made a different deal.”  
Booker can feel his veins turn to ice as he watches her eyes light with excitement, her pupils dilating like a predator taking in prey. “What deal?”  
“We get to abscond before the party. They get to use your cell phone and a video of you as bait and I get to take you away. Your team will no doubt wipe this place clean, hiding my involvement and you and I will be far away having all sorts of fun. I’m not the kind of woman to make the same mistake twice. Trying to keep all of you at once is far too risky but just one, much easier to transport. Much easier to keep hidden. Besides, you were the one who wanted this in the first place. I’ve been working on your little problem since we’ve been separated and I’ve got a few different ideas we could work on together. Discovery is a specialty of mine you see. You already got to try one of my concoctions earlier,” she pauses to pull out her clipboard again and then looks back at Booker with a dark light in behind her eyes. “Tell me how did you like it? Seems it made you quite violent, or is that just your regular disposition?” Dr. Kozak asks motioning to the bit of face on the ground with her pen, the glass in her coat clinking at the movement.   
Booker is interrupted from answering by the sound of gun fire. It’s a short burst, distant but Booker could still hear the scream of whoever had been on the other end of what sounded like a M4A1, a gun that Nile favoured as a former Marine.   
Dr. Kozak startles at the noise, “No, they’re too early. My transport doesn’t get here for another hour!” Another burst of gunfire comes from the same direction but it sounds like a hand gun, maybe a glock. Dr. Kozak swears profusely and begins pacing. She appears to be trying to figure out if she can move Booker on her own. She looks like she’s about to ask him to come with her but he glares at her, dissuading her from asking.   
“Sorry doc, looks like the party's over. This has been great and all but we’ll have to reschedule,” Booker sasses. Dr. Kozak has stopped pacing and stares at him. She smiles and Booker feels a chill go up his spine.   
“It would appear you’re right. Don’t worry Booker, I’ll find you again and I won’t be leaving you without a party favour,” She pulls a syringe and two small glass bottles from her pocket, the source of the glass sounds he’d been hearing. The gunfire is steadily getting closer, and Booker isn’t able to differentiate the guns anymore. Dr. Kozak works quickly, pulling the end of the syringe off with her teeth and shakes the tiny bottle before sliding in the needle and pulling the liquid in. She depresses the liquid from the syringe into the second bottle before shaking the two together and pulls the new mixture into the syringe once again. She flicks the syringe as she depresses the end slightly, getting rid of any air bubbles. It’s a large syringe and Booker pulls uselessly at his bonds, knowing that she’s going to get that into him before his team can get to him. They’re too far away still, he can tell from the sound of the violence outside. He doesn’t particularly want to be high off his ass for his first meeting with his team in a year but there isn’t much he can do to stop Kozak. She finishes prepping the syringe and looks him dead in the eye, a deadly smile at the corner of her mouth.   
“I’ve already got some new samples to continue my study in your absence,” she motions to the cooler beside her and Booker has a sick confirmation of where the blood on his torso, pants and the puddle at his feet had come from. “Till next time Booker. Oh and please do make sure you take detailed note of your experience for me won’t you? For science,” and she plunges the needle into his chest, straight into his heart. Booker grunts. It’s not pleasant but it’s far from the biggest thing he's been stabbed in the heart with. She depresses the plunger and a slow heat starts to seep into his chest from the site of the injection. She takes the needle out and puts it back in her pocket. Booker hopes it stabs her. She takes the wheeled cooler and with one last look of regret, quickly departs out the side door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right so this story just keeps getting longer, it was really suppose to only be one chapter but well here we are. Hope you enjoy some Whump for Halloween.


	10. Mais les Choses Insensées ne Doivent pas être Craintes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But Things Innocuous Need Not Be Feared   
> -Inferno

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have a bit of a POV shift halfway through just so you aren't confused. This Ch. is a bit of a doozy so make sure that you are in a good place to read it. It gets worse before it gets better friends.

Chapter Ten

Booker sighs in relief as Kozak leaves and waits as the sounds of rescue come nearer. Once upon a time he would have gone with Kozak. Would've gratefully accepted the opportunity to be rid of his curse. Now though, he’s got debts to pay before he goes. He may not be completely ready for the coming family reunion but it was as good a time as any.   
Booker takes a deep breath in to steady his nerves and it’s at this point the heat from the injection site in his chest is starting to become uncomfortable. He has the sudden anxiety that this isn’t the same thing that the doctor had given him earlier. There hadn’t been any burning sensation with the psychoactive symptoms before. Now that he’s become aware of the sensation it builds and spreads, his heart pumping whatever Kozak had given him quickly through his body. He breathes slowly and his body starts to sweat as the heat in his bloodstream steadily climbs. He can hear footsteps running just outside the room and short bursts of frantic voices over the radios, too far to make out the exact words but close enough to hear the panic. His breathing is starting to speed up. He can feel a build up of sweat on his upper lip and at the small of his back. He pulls at his bonds again and fidgets uncomfortably as the heat keeps steadily rising in his body. He hears a room down the way kicked open and someone shouts, “Clear.” It’s Joe’s voice, calling out to the others as they are making their way through the facility looking for him. He clenches his jaw tight and he grinds his teeth together. The burning has steadily risen from uncomfortable to painful. Someone is trying to get in the room where he’s at. He can hear the handle halfway turned when there’s the sound of a single bullet impacting and the slide of a body down the door.   
Booker tries to focus on his imminent rescue, on how nervous and relieved he’s going to be to be with the others again. How awkward the first little while is going to be. Whether they are going to let him stay just to recover with them or if they’ll let him stay longer. He wonders if Quynh found them or they found him on their own.   
Booker tries to keep concentrating on the sounds of his team getting closer, squeezing his eyes closed and holding in a moan as the burning pain starts to turn to fierce scorching agony. Booker has been burned badly before, he’s even burned to death on occasion. Most of the time it’s only the superficial burns that hurt, the really deep ones scorch the nerves and you don’t feel much after that. This feels like his veins are bursting into flame, like they’re going to spill open and he’s going to be a bleeding, charred mess by the time his team finds him. He feels like he’s being seared from the inside. He bites his lip and clenches his fists. He really doesn’t want to be screaming by the time the team finds him. It seems rude somehow. He wishes he could stop his heart in his chest as it inexorably spreads the broiling torment steadily through his entire body. He feels like his eyes are going to melt in their sockets, like his organs are boiling, and his skin is cooking.   
He’s so concentrated on not screaming in pain that he doesn’t notice he isn’t alone in the room till someone lays a hand on his chest. All of the pain he’s been shoring down inside himself collects and concentrates on that point of contact and suddenly he can’t keep a howl in anymore, flinching back violently. The point of contact feels like he’s been flayed, like the outer layer of skin and tissue was peeled off and his nerves were laid bare for someone to pluck and play with as they willed. He looks down expecting to see a bloody wound but sees only unblemished skin, rising and falling in fast, hiccuping breaths.   
“Libretto, it’s me. It’s okay…” The voice sounds like it’s far away and too loud at the same time. He looks up and doesn’t believe his eyes. The sight doesn’t feel real. He thinks maybe the doctor had injected him with another psychoactive agent after all because it’s Nicky in front of him. He knew his team was coming, he could hear their approach, but a part of him hadn’t really believed they would actually come, not for him. Not after what he’d done to them.   
He opens his mouth to say something, to apologize, to say how much he missed him, to explain the doctor and the drug she’d injected him with, anything. Instead all that comes out is a sob. Nicky looks good, not a wound on him. He’s eyes are sharper than he remembers, his mouth firmer. Nicky moves to touch him again, to steady and comfort him but Booker flinches away from him. The points where the ropes are tied around his wrists and the tips of his toes that are making contact with the floor are points of blazing agony. Where his jeans hang off his hips and each bit of contact the material makes with his skin is scorching anguish. He doesn’t know if it’s sweat or tears streaming down his face but the running liquid feels like boiling lava streaking his skin. He feels peeled and stripped, nothing but a bleeding screaming nerve.   
“What’s the hold up, grab him and let's go,” it’s Joe at the door, Booker can hear him shifting his gun and unsheathing his sword, covering Nicky so he can extricate Booker.   
“Somethings wrong, he’s in pain but I can’t see any wounds. He won’t let me touch him,” Nicky’s talking around Booker, his hands hovering anxiously, wanting to grab Booker but clearly spooked at whatever is going on that he can’t see. He’d always been insightful, reading the cues people put off in body language and reading between the lines. Booker wonders if Nicky truly had been surprised by his betrayal or if he had known Booker’s capacity for it all along. If that was why he’d been so calm in the lab. Joe comes further into the room then, his heavy boots moving quickly from the door to where Booker’s hanging. When he comes into sight, Booker can’t deny that it’s tears anymore. God he’s missed them so much.  
“Basti, hey buddy. We need to grab you and go alright? The girls are holding the front but we need to go,” Joe is by Nicky now, glancing over him, clearly looking for wounds. He takes in the pile of sick and blood at Booker’s feet and something complicated crosses his face. The sounds of gunfire and an explosion slowly filter back into Booker’s awareness. His team is here, they’re going to get him out and he’s the liability once again. He steadies his breathing as best he can and nods at Joe, preparing himself for the pain. Nicky pulls the needle from his arm, he barely touches him but his fingers feel like hot embers. He then waits as Joe slashes the ropes above his head with one quick movement. Nicky catches his body before it can slam into the floor.   
Booker’s been around the mill in his time. The torture sessions with Quynh were bad but weren’t the worst pain he’s ever been through. He’s been tortured, injured, and experienced pain in a vast variety of ways, far too numerous for him to recount. The thing about pain is that it always has a cap. The body uses pain to dissuade you from harm. Don’t touch fire, that burns and can lead to infection, don’t cut yourself, that causes blood to go out and eventually death, survival type messages. But the body will only take so much pain before it cuts off the message or you lose consciousness. Booker is familiar with the extent of his body's pain tolerance. There’s always a point in which his body would hit it’s limit but not in this case. Booker would curse Kozak for being a sadistic bitch but he’s too busy drowning in agony. Whatever she had given him, it seems to have turned off whatever pain limit his body had hard wired in. It’s like a descending waterfall, you know there’s only so far you can fall before you hit the pool. This, what Kozak injected him with, has inverted his waterfall. Suddenly there’s no bottom, only a fathomless expanse to continue falling forever. When Nicky catches him he soars deeper into an extent of pain than he has ever known before, deeper than he knew was possible for the human body to endure. He reaches the point where he’d usually pass out and climbs into insanity inducing extremes of sensation, aware the entire time. Nicky’s hands and arms feel like burning bands surrounding him, peeling him open. He jerks in Nicky’s grasp, pushing away so violently that Nicky drops him. He shrieks when he hits the floor, writhing and trying to escape the points of contact but there’s nowhere he can go to escape it now. He feels his vocal chords shred as he screams and claws at his face, doing anything to escape the torment. He wants to curl up, wants to throw up, wants more than anything to vanish, to no longer exist. Joe tries to stop him from clawing his face and Booker mindlessly lashes out. All he knows is pain. The two men, closer than brothers, are strangers to his current state of awareness. There is only the pain.

\------

Joe carefully follows behind Nicky and Andy, adjusting his hold on Booker’s body as he steps over several corpses of the men they’d despatched on their sweep through the building. Joe feels intensely unsettled and can admit to himself this is the most helpless and scared he’s felt since Merrick’s lab.   
A few days before Copley had called, warning them that his house had been hit by a mysterious band of well armed mercenaries and that their current location was compromised. They’d abandoned the house they were in in Japan and immediately traveled separate ways only to reconvene in Slovenia. This wasn’t the first time they’d had to quickly abandon a safe house but it was the first time in a long time he and Nicky hadn’t been able to be together in the shift. They weren’t one of those couples who couldn’t be apart, they just didn’t like to be. There were often missions that called for their particular skills to be used in different areas. They also lived in pocket with two other people. They were careful with PDA or outward shows of affection. It’d been different with Andy and Quynh. The two women themselves had been open and affectionate in their relationship. Things had changed after Qyunh had been taken. He and Nicky hadn’t wanted Andy to feel excluded or to be constantly reminded of what she’d lost, so they’d kept their physical affection to friendly touches and the intimate stuff they saved for private. It was worse with Booker. He’d never come out and said it but they knew that the frenchman envied and maybe, in his darker moments, resented their relationship. Joe could only imagine that it reminded him of his own losses and loneliness. So they’d tried their best to keep to themselves. Never had they imagined that their attempts to protect their friend had further isolated and imbittered him towards them.   
The past year had been hard on their team. The weight of their own perceived failures and the failure of their friend sitting heavy on them all. They had opened themselves to Nile in a way they hadn’t with Booker. Maybe it was fear of a repeat, maybe it was a few hundred years of added wisdom, Joe wasn’t sure but they were trying, not harder but smarter maybe with Nile. Booker had been bitter and jaded before they ever got to him, a product of his time and experiences. He’d lived a life of idealism and been betrayed by it. Nile on the other hand was aware of the failings of the world around her but not defeated by it. She had far less baggage, less heartbreak in her lifetime, though not an insignificant amount.   
Nile’s idealism reminded Joe of Nicky. A feeling of greater purpose, a determination to help make the world become a safer and better place, and the single minded stubbornness to not give up. Not that Nicky had never had his doubts, he’d gone through a difficult period of adjustment in their beginning years and they had had their moments. Certain wars and atrocities hit too close. Nicky’s kindness and hope had been something that he’d carefully cultivated through his many years. Joe was sure Nile would be the same. He himself, his hope was guided by Nicky. They were good for each other. Each of them reflecting the best of one another. Joe was satisfied with saving innocent people and hunting the bad ones. It wasn’t a simple life but with Nicky at his side, it was a good one. So when Copley had called on a burner phone and told them to go to ground and Joe was forced to take a seperate flight pattern and wait a few days for Nicky to make it by train, it had not been insignificant for him. When danger was approaching it was his instinct to pull Nicky closer, not allow him to go his own way.   
He couldn’t help the memories of Andy after she’d lost Quynh and the familiar fear that those memories inspired. For years she’d been single minded in her determination, running on nothing but rage and desperation. When the trail had truly gone cold so too had her drive. She’d been listless and empty for a long time. It wasn’t until they found Booker that they’d seen her with a purpose again. She’d been forced to step up, in a way that Nicky and Joe hadn’t needed her, for Booker. He’d been so simularily distraught and burdened that the two of them had connected on a level of grief that, in hindsight, may have been detrimental to both of their mental states.   
Joe’s become familiar with grief in the many years of his life. Losing family and friends to time and death, seeing familiar cities and nations that they loved burnt in war or rebuilt over time, and the seemingly never ending tragedies and cruelties of life. He’s been reacquainted with the phases of grief over this past year. Anger being the obvious first stage for him. Nicky didn’t like processing emotion in public, he was a private feeler. Joe though felt openly and honestly, even when inconvenient. He doesn’t regret his words to Booker in the Merrick’s lab, they were honest and not inaccurate but he does regret not being able to follow them up. It’s not like he and Booker have never fought before. There’d been many a harsh word and angry argument over the years but there had also always been the opportunity to talk, drink, or wrestle it out. Joe had felt the last year of Booker’s absence keenly and painfully, like a scabbed wound, not festering but continuously picked at, laid open and rebleeding.   
As valued and important Nile is to their team, she doesn’t fit the Booker shaped hole in their lives. She’s a circle where Booker had been a square peg. Joe had had to learn that she was her own person, not a replacement or place holder. The two of them fought different, played different, lived different. Booker was quiet, unobtrusive, nearly always in the corner, willing to participate but satisfied with being a wallflower. Nile was front and centre. She was a magnet in a room full of bobby pins, everyone pulled in by her magnitude. She laughed freely, cried when sad, and raged when angry. She was unguarded in a way that maybe only Joe himself was.   
Booker had been their steady shadow. He’d been reliable, always the one to watch their backs. He was the one who’d swoop in and protect a wounded member, he was the one who’d notice the little things. He’d start stupid games with Nicky after a bad mission, get him laughing and distracted. He’d drink with Andy on anniversaries of Quynh’s capture, commerserating and grieving with her. He’d pick fights with him when Joe needed to blow off steam, pulling him into wrestling matches and then listening when he felt ready to talk it out. Joe regrets not being able to read his friend as well as his friend had read him. He missed having Booker’s company and input when he would read to the group at night on their off days. He missed knowing that Andy was being watched and secure with Booker behind her. He regrets not having him alongside them as they brought Nile into their orbit, misses his input and quiet attention.   
It’d been both cathartic and painful as hell talking to Booker all those months ago on the phone. He’d been worried, though reluctantly so, and hearing Booker so nonchalant had galled him. He almost wished Booker had needed them, so he’d have an excuse to barge back into his life. He knew it wasn’t right but he kind of hoped that Booker would be a hopeless wreck without them, that he’d be so miserable that he’d never try to leave them again. He regrets those impulses now.   
It wasn’t until the day after the team had safely reconvened, that shit hit the fan. They’d all been so grateful each of them had made it to the safe house. They’d been sitting around eating in the living room when Nile’s cell rang with an unknown caller. She’d answered it as they’d all hung around anxiously, scared they’d been discovered. An angry female voice had thundered over the phone but they were only able to hear Nile’s side of the conversation. Nile had listened, looking a little bewildered, before responding.  
“Woah slow down, this is Jenny? Booker’s girlfriend?” Nile had given them a look of shock and confusion as the voice on the other side continued on in what sounded like hysterics. It was only a few sentences in that Nile’s face drained of blood and her eyes had darted to them.   
“It’s Booker. Someone’s taken him.” Andy had tried to speak with Jenny but she’d stubbornly insisted that she’d only speak to Nile. Nile related to them that someone had broken into Booker and Jenny’s home. There was an empty canister of tear gas in the living room and confetti from a spent taser in the backyard. There were also two separate blood pools, one in the living room and one out the broken back window but no bodies and no Booker. After assuring Jenny that they’d be looking into it Nile hung up and dialed Copley.   
The heavy weight of guilt in the room had been suffocating as all of them realized their relief of being together and safe hadn't extended to their wayward member and none of them had even thought to warn him. He was just so outside their world of danger, living on his farm with his cozy cabin, menagerie of animals and apparently a secret girlfriend, that they didn't’ think anyone would even think to go after him. It had been sloppy and now their friend was suffering for their shortsightedness.   
Joe didn’t know what to think about Booker having a long term roommate/girlfriend. Booker never mentioned her to any of them and Nile only knew about her because apparently Jenny had answered Booker’s phone once. Joe felt partially responsible about not knowing about Jenny. The texts he sent Booker weren’t particularly inviting him to share his life details with him. He’s glad now that she was there. It would have been days before they would have noticed him missing if it weren’t for her call.   
It’s not the first time one of their team has been taken by enemies, not by far, but this time felt different. He’d been in the open, easy pickings. No one had had his back, which had been Joe’s not so secret fear all year. At first he’d enjoyed the image of Booker unguarded, wanting to punish Booker for his betrayal, make Booker feel their absence. Then the news of Quynh’s death and Booker not returning Nile’s call. Joe stopped feeling justified and started feeling worried and upset. Booker had reassured him the next day that he felt the banishment was right, that he wanted the space and Joe had allowed himself to be pacified.   
He’d felt sick with guilt as they’d called Copley, trying to get information on where he’d been taken. Apparently Copley had already ID’d the group that had broken into his residence and they assumed it’d be the same ones who had grabbed Booker. It was a nasty group of mercenaries they’d had had a few run-ins with across Europe and northern Africa. A noxious group of people who hired their guns out to kidnapping, human trafficking, murder, assassinations, organ harvesting really anything they’d get paid for. They hadn’t directly targeted the group but had busted up a few places they'd been hired to protect. Now though, they had gone after Copley and had Booker which meant they were looking for them specifically and were willing to put their friends and associates in jeopardy to go after them. That made them a high priority target in desperate need of wiping off the face of the planet in Joe’s estimation.   
They’d packed up, quiet in their collective anxiety, and had booked passage with a cargo plane used for smuggling into Paris. Copley had apparently tracked Booker’s phone to a warehouse in La Rochelle near the port. They’d landed and met with Copley’s contact in Paris who geared them up. It took them nearly four hours to make it from Paris, with Andy flooring it the entire way. The drive had been heavy and mostly quiet. Nicky and Nile had looked pissed, seething silently, while Andy had mostly looked determined and scared. He just felt sick.  
They’d come at the warehouse from the east, with Nicky and Nile sniping off as many guards as they could without alerting the whole compound. When they’d sniped who they could the four of them went in to start picking the guards off in close combat. They’d made their way through a decent amount when an unlucky guard had managed to grab his radio before Andy’s ax had lodged in his head. With that the surprise was over and they pulled out their louder but more efficient guns. They’d quickly swept through the stacks of shipping containers, planting a few low grade proximity explosives along the way and into the garage where Andy and Nile had set up while Nicky and Joe went further into the warehouse to look for Booker. They’d efficiently swept through, checking the rooms as they went and killing the guards who were unlucky enough to get in their way. The guards hadn’t managed to regroup enough to put up a decent counter attack and were therefore easy to pick off. This was easy, maybe too easy, Joe thought uneasily to himself as he cleared another empty room.   
Joe and Nicky kicked in doors and called out to each as they went but no sign of Booker through the full front half of the building. They were reaching the back of the building when Nicky had sniped a man as he was trying to get in through a door down the hall from them. His face had been wrapped with bloody gauze and Joe had smirked, knowing that Booker had been fighting back. They kicked the body over, out of the way of the door and opened it.   
The room had high ceilings and large industrial lights but was sparse other than a single man hung from his arms in the center. Joe had heaved a sigh of relief and nodded for Nicky to go in while he stayed just outside the door, guarding the hallway. He heard Nicky call out to Booker a few times, his heavy boots making their way over to their friend while Booker remained silent at the approach. Nicky’s footsteps went still and Joe heard him speak to Booker gently once again and then Booker had yelped. It was a sound of repressed pain, someone trying to hold in their noises but in too much pain to force them all back. It’d gripped Joe’s heart and squeezed it once again with aching guilt. He heard Nicky speaking to Booker, trying to calm him down, let him know that help had arrived. Joe couldn’t stay away any longer when he heard him whimper, the sound helpless and scared.   
Their group was not immune to pain. They felt every cut, burn, and bullet their body inevitably healed. They haven't become numb to them but they all have high pain tolerances. Joe’s watched Booker take bullets silently and heal from grievous wounds with only a grunt. So to hear him make those sort of noises, twists his insides up and ratchets up his anxiety to something nearly unbearable.  
He went into the room then, unsheathing his sword as he went. Nicky was still talking to Booker, near but not touching. Joe had asked what was going on and then he was there in front of Booker. He hadn’t seen Booker for a year and wished he wasn’t seeing him like this. Booker was pale, with high flushed cheeks and sweat gathering on his forehead and streaming down his face, mixing with tears, that leaked from the corners of his clenched eyes. When Joe got close enough those eyes opened and watched him, a feverish tint to them and something like desperation. Joe took in his friend’s appearance. There was blood and sick on the floor but no outward injury that he could see. He shared an uneasy glance with Nicky as they heard one of their proximity mines going off in the yard, before asking Booker if they could cut him down. He could see Booker steal himself before he nodded. He flinched away from them again as Nicky gently pulled the needle from his arm but remained resolutely quiet. Joe wished desperately that he’d never gone through with the banishment.   
As the ropes had fallen and Nicky caught him, Booker screamed out in pain, writhing away from Nicky’s arms and nearly convulsing on the dirty hard ground.   
When you go through something terrible people often say they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy. Well Booker wasn’t his worst enemy, he was his friend. He’d never wanted Booker to suffer what he and Nicky had. The main purpose of the banishment in his mind hadn't been punishment. He’d wanted Booker to miss them, to realize how much he needed them. Never in a million years had he wanted this. He wanted Booker back, wanted him healed and happy, not this.   
Andy had stormed in then, summoned by their tardiness and then by the screams. The sounds Booker had made didn’t even sound human and when she got a look at what was the cause she’d stopped dead.   
They’ve all seen each other at their worst in a hundred different iterations. Booker didn’t even look human. He’d been tearing at his own skin, at his face and his arms, crying and sobbing like a child. He contorted and writhed so fiercely Joe was sure he was going to break bones. He’d reached out to his friend, trying to stop him from clawing himself and instead got a wildy thrown elbow in the face. He kneeled just out of reach with a bloody nose and a helpless, panic filled expression on his face. Nicky hoverd, helpless tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, both just staring. He’d flinched as Andy had taken quick steps into the room and crouched down next to Booker. She got her hands on his head and quickly snapped his neck. Booker had gone suddenly and disturbingly quiet. Joe prayed it would keep him down long enough for them to get out. He and Nicky looked at her with shock and thankfulness in their eyes, both looking haunted and a little ashamed that neither of them had thought to do it quicker.   
“Grab him, we need to go,” Andy had instructed and led the way out into the hall. Nicky then helped Joe throw Booker over his shoulder and they followed after their leader. 

Joe is brought back out of his memories and into the present as Booker slams back into consciousness. Usually when they come awake it's with a gasp or a cough. Booker awakens with a wail. Before Joe even knows what’s going on, Booker’s thrown himself to the side, pushing at Joe with desperate strength, causing Joe to lose his grip. Booker falls head first, hits the cement floor with a sickening crack, and falls silent at the impact. Joe stands in shock before Andy snaps at him to keep going. He carefully picks Booker’s body back up, with slightly shaking hands. The side of Booker’s face and head are covered in blood and he can see his cracked skull through a gash but Joe dutifully ignores it, this will at least take longer for Booker to reawaken. Andy and Nicky have stopped in front covering him, both casting worried glances back at their unconscious friend before continuing to lead the way. 

They continue through the warehouse to where Nile is waiting in the garage. The room is filled with big industrial trucks and a van. They’ll have to use one to make their escape. The plan was to get back out to their own vehicle but it was across the expansive lot and over a large barbed wire fence. They’d expected Booker to be able to make it there under his own power. Nile had managed to keep the remaining mercenaries at bay in their absence, pinned back behind some shipping containers and unable to get past her shrewd eye and good aim. She’s been working on sniping with Nicky the past few months and Joe was satisfied with the results as bodies continued to pile up under the onslaught of her steady hand. Nile gives Booker’s body a worried look as it remains still over his shoulder. He can feel the blood from Booker’s head wound soaking his back. Nile returns her gaze to the combatants in front of her. Andy and Nicky quickly head up behind Nile to help pick off the remaining enemies as Joe goes to the singular van. The back doors are locked but he shoots the lock and gently slides Booker’s body into the back, setting him up against some duffles bags, before setting himself up as guard.   
He’s never seen anything like this before. For Booker to be in so much pain but for there to be no wounds is highly concerning. Even if he’d had extreme internal damage, it should have healed by now. The lacerations from his wrists where he'd been tied up were faded and gone, as were the self inflicted claw marks and the head wound from the fall. He had no signs of internal damage, no bruises or broken ribs.   
Joe was forced to pull his attention away from their downed member at the sound of approaching vehicles. Four tactical humvees pull up, pouring out reinforcements. Andy quickly relocates to cover the east side and yells for Joe to cover the west. Joe reluctantly leaves the van Booker’s in and goes to one of the side bay doors, just out of sight of the van, to make sure the team isn’t flanked and overwhelmed. He’s no good to Booker here, they need to get him out before they can deal with whatever’s been done to him.


	11. Une Dette, Une Dette Payée

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Debt Owed, A Debt Paid

Chapter Eleven

Booker awakens to the sound of his own frantic heartbeat. He’s alone in some sort of van and he can hear a gunfight somewhere near him. It’s only seconds after awareness hits him that the pain follows. His hands shake as he pulls them in towards his chest, holding his heart from the outside, wishing he could just pry it out. He’s never had any pain that didn’t fade after death. For whatever drug is in his system to still be active after two deaths is, debilitatingly scary. What if this is forever now? An endless stream of awake and pain and then death, over and over again for eternity. He only had a small taste of what that would look like through Quynh’s nightmares and he’d almost gone insane. He quickly shunts the thought aside and concentrates. If there’s anything he’s good at, it's thinking.  
He remembers waking up the first time, slung over Joe’s shoulder, after Andy had snapped his neck. The pain had been present and all consuming before even conscious thought. It’s slower this time. Building into a steady crescendo. It starts in his heart again and travels out through his blood stream, building in intensity as the time goes by. He gets stuck on the thought of his heart and his veins. Something had changed between the first death at Andy’s hands and the second where he’d brained himself on the floor. He’d lost a lot of blood when he’d hit his head, he can feel it cooling on his skin and soaking his hair. The realization hits like a bolt of lightning. It’s in his blood, whatever is causing this agony. He needs to bleed.   
He frantically searches his body and the area around himself for a weapon, anything to cause himself to bleed or to stop his heart but comes up cursedly empty. He’s starting to recognize the momentum of the pain, it hurts but he knows it’s only going to keep building if he doesn’t do something quick. If it's anything like when he first got hit with the drugs then he has two minutes at most before he’ll be debilitated by pain. He sits up and rips open the zipper of the duffle he’s propped up against and stops short. It’s filled with explosives and it has a timer. His body goes numb with shock and it’s almost a relief if it weren’t for the sudden and all consuming panic. The timer is for 2 minutes and 47 seconds and counting down.   
He has a moment of bone deep terror that the team had left him here to die but he can hear Andy yelling something outside. His all consuming fear of the pain reaching its peak pauses its urgency, superseded by the new threat to his team. He pushes himself up to his knees and shuffles towards the open doors at the back of the van. His knees scream at him but he bites his lip and keeps going.   
Dropping a foot out the back of the van, he uses the door as an aid levering himself to his feet. He nearly collapses but locks his knees through sheer willpower. He can see Nile and Nicky ahead of him. They’ve taken cover behind some boxes at the open bay doors in the front and are holding off an incoming wave of enemy combatants set up behind a few humvees. They look bad. They both have tears through their shirts where bullets had punched through. The side of Nile’s head is covered in gore and Booker thinks he sees brain matter and skull fragments on the ground behind her and as he watches Nicky takes a bullet through the arm. He drops down behind the boxes, his rifle falling to the ground, unable to hold with two hands anymore, before pulling a handgun from the holster on his back with his injury free hand and continues to cover Nile. He can’t see Joe but can hear fighting from the side bay doors around the corner and assumes he must be there. He can see Andy. She’s holding up the door to the rest of the warehouse, peeking around the corner occasionally and shooting through a nearby window to help Nicky and Nile with the Mercs out front as well as guarding the other entrance.   
At the sight of his team, his family, Booker suddenly understands the real trap that they'd all walked straight into. Kozak had lied to him, she’d never meant to take him with her like she’d said. This warehouse had been specifically chosen. They’d put a skeleton crew inside the warehouse with him as bait, bait that would slow them down with the drug the doctor had given him, and kept the bulk of their men waiting offsite to trap them inside. The reinforced troops have bigger guns, and more of them, Booker can hear the high caliber, but they aren’t pushing in towards the warehouse. There are at Booker’s quick count, approximately 15 bags in the back of the van. They are simply putting up a good fight and keeping their team inside with the bomb that is the van. Keeping their distance but insuring the team won’t get out in time. The bomb won’t permanently kill them but it will put them all down long enough for them to be taken. Well it won’t permanently kill all of them. Booker lingers for a second longer, watching Andy. She won’t survive the bomb. She’d die in the flames and then he and the rest of them would be at the hands of the deranged woman who’d picked pieces of Nicky and Joe out of them while they watched each other and who’d developed a drug that had crippled him through two deaths and was still going.   
Not on his watch. Booker grits his teeth and clenches his fists. He’s got a debt to pay to these people that goes beyond his betrayal. To Nicky who has sat at his side through many a hangover and held him as he grieved. To Joe who has listened to him describe his family and his memories and painted pictures of them for him. To Nile who was willing to forgive him with an apology and had stubbornly stuck to communicating with him, throughout all of his bullshit, even though she’d only been with him for a couple of days. To Andy who waited next to his body for him to awaken countless times and defended his back through shit shows the world over. He owes them for countless meals around countless fires, laughing and talking. He owes them for all the tears shed, in commiseration or shared grief. He owes them for the stories shared and the books read together. He owes them for their shared cultures, the holidays and sacred wisdom shared amongst the group. He owes them his soul, because if it weren’t for them, he’d have lost it centuries ago.  
It’s been mere seconds for him to put the pieces together and come up with a plan but it was long enough for the drug to grow in intensity once again. He stumbles as he walks around to the front of the van, but stubbornly keeps his feet. There's too much at stake here for him to falter. Every step feels like walking on bloody stumps but he’d walk through hell for these people.  
Booker ignores his shaking hands as he grabs the handle of the driver’s side door and pulls, only to discover it’s locked. He swears in frustration, feeling the sweat start to gather on his forehead once again. He doesn’t have time for this. He slams his fist at the window, shouting through the pain and breaks it on his third hit. His arm is cut up in the broken glass and Booker deliberately makes some more gashes. As the blood flees his body, some of the heat and pain leaves with it, clearing his head. All the while he keeps up the internal countdown.  
Booker sighs in momentary relief as he unlocks the door. There are, unsurprisingly, no keys inside, so Booker pulls the wires from beneath the dash. He uses his teeth to strip the wires and hotwires the van. The cuts on his arms have sealed shut by this point and Booker slams his arm down on the broken glass in the window again to get it bleeding as he climbs into the driver's seat. He hurriedly backs the van out of it’s spot against the wall and backs up with front of the bay doors straight ahead. All the while, his fingers sizzle at the sensation of touching and holding the wheel. He feels like his eyes should be blazing and bleeding. Every point of contact his body makes with his surroundings is, well, torturous but he isn’t about to stop now. He catches a glimpse of Andy as she turns her eyes on him. The look on her face brings him back to that fateful day in Copley’s house, as she’d looked at him with such anger and such heartbreak. He’d spent weeks under Quynh’s rage, trying to make it right. He’d spent months learning how to be a better person to be with her again before the end. All of it useless if he loses her here.   
He tightens his grip on the wheel and revs the engine, pulling his gaze away from her. He can see Joe from his new position, who gives him a shocked look and is yelling something Booker can’t hear. The momentary distraction causes Joe to get hit in the stomach, doubling him over but Booker can’t stop, he’s been counting and he has 15 seconds before the countdown completes. Joe looks at him like Booker’s betrayed him all over again and Booker feels his heart in his throat. Nile and Nicky have also turned at the sudden noise of the van, startled and confused. Booker can see Nicky twitch the gun in his direction, unsure if he’s going to pull the trigger.  
He hits the gas and honks, causing both Nicky and Nile to jump out of the way. He can see the momentary hesitation in Nicky’s face before he tumbles to the side, tucking the gun away.   
Booker heads straight through the open bay doors, through the boxes Nicky and Nile had used as cover and out towards the humvees where most of the mercs have taken cover. He can see the exact moment they realize what’s coming for them. They yell and several try to run. One takes aim and Booker feels the punch of several bullets through his chest and out his back. The new pain is almost relieving, it momentarily blocks out whatever the drug had been doing. He knows it’s going to be fatal so he opens the door and slides out as the van carries on with its momentum, slamming into the front humvee. He comes to rest on his back and hears the explosion before he feels the heat of it across his side. He thinks he’s far enough away that he didn’t actually catch fire but he can’t actually tell. The pain from the drug is leaking away as he quickly bleeds out through several holes in his chest and what must be large exit wounds on his back. He stares up at the sky as he’s filled with blessed numbness and cold. He’s grateful as his heart finally stops, the damage from the bullets taking their toll. 

The next time Booker wakes up it’s slow. He can feel his chest closing the bullet wounds. He takes quick inventory, terrified that he’s been taken again. He’s on his side, his head on something soft and he can there’s a blanket over his shoulders. He isn’t tied up. He can feel a rumbling in the ground around him and he can hear an engine. He opens his eyes slowly, blinking as he takes in his surroundings. He’s in the back of a van, a different van. His head is cushioned on a folded up jacket that has the familiar smell of cinnamon and musk. He’s not sure if it’s Joe’s or Nicky’s, their scent is so intermingled that Booker can’t tell the difference but it smells like safety and comfort. He can feel the swelling heat in his heart once again, though it’s muted and not filled with the intensity that it had been before. He waits for the pain to escalate with bated breath but blessedly it remains at low simmer. He moves to place his hand over his chest, groaning softly and the noise he makes calls the attention of the two passengers beside him. Nile and Nicky are both sitting opposite him and Nile takes notice of his awareness first.   
“Booker, how’re you doing? Is the pain gone? Can you tell us what happened?” Nile says all this as she shuffles closer, hesitating to touch but clearly wanting to. Booker takes a few deep breaths, assessing himself before answering.  
“It hurts all over but not like before. I can handle this. How did you find me?” His voice sounds rough and he coughs to clear his throat. He avoids answering the how and the who for now. It’s going to unsettle them all to hear of Dr. Kozak’s escape and apparent continued fascination with them all. They need to be in a more secure location for that. Nile and Nicky share a glance, clearly seeing his reticence and blessedly choosing to let it drop, at least for now. He can only imagine the pathetic picture he must make. He’s holding himself, knees pulled in and he’s covered in drying and dried blood.  
“Jenny called us,” Nile responds, smoothing out the blanket where it’d bunched near his feet.  
“Jenny?” Booker remembers suddenly the call from all those months ago. Quynh and her stupid accent answering Nile’s call for him. He covers his momentary confusion with very real exhaustion. He rubs at his eyes and leans back for a moment before stirring himself.  
“Fuck, Jenny. She’s going to be worried sick. Do you have her number? Can I borrow your phone to call her?”  
“Of course,” Nile fishes out her phone from her pocket. As she looks up Jenny’s phone number Booker asks, “Where are we going?”  
“Safe house in Marseilles,” Nicky answers and Booker makes eye contact with him for the first time since waking. Nicky looks rough. His clothes are a bloody mess and his eyes are icy, he looks wary and a little pissed off. Booker’s not quite sure if he’s angry at him or for him, or more likely a confusing mix of both but either way Booker is just so damn glad to see him. Nile hands over the phone having pulled up the recent unknown caller.  
Booker takes the phone and presses the call button. He waits with bated breath as the phone rings three times before it connects.  
“Jenny, it’s me.”  
“Booker, oh my god. Are you alright? The team, they found you?” Quynh’s voice comes over the phone and Booker nearly cries with relief. He’d been terrified at the back of his brain that they’d set up a trap for her as well, that she was being held at some other location, being tortured and injected as he was.   
“Yeah they found me. I’m okay, everything's alright. Are you still at the farm? Are the animals alright?”  
“Yes I’m still here and everyone’s fine. Looks like whoever grabbed you wasn’t interested in staying for long. They were all gone by the time I got home.” Booker breathes out a sigh, releasing the tension from his shoulders that he hadn’t even consciously noticed. He thinks for a few moments, knowing what needs to happen next but dreading it.  
“Good, good. Listen, I’d like to bring the team back with me if it’s alright with you. We need a place to lay long for the night and then we need to move. I think it’s time for them to meet you.”  
The line was quiet besides Quynh’s breathing for a couple of seconds, “Do you really think they’re ready? Do you think I’m ready?”  
“Darling, I know they’ll love you. We’ll be there in a few hours alright?”  
“Yeah. Yeah, alright. I’ll have everything packed and ready to go for when you get here. And Booker, I’m glad you’re alright.”   
“Me too, see you soon.” Booker hangs up the phone and looks up at the other two.   
“Could we go to Grenoble instead? I need to make sure she’s alright and we need to move the animals,” Booker asks with a knot of tension in his throat. They’ve only been back together for a few minutes and already he’s asking them to trust him. To bring them to an unknown location, with an unknown person there. A location that has already been compromised.   
“We can do that,” Booker whips his head around and notices for the first time Joe in the passenger front seat. He’s turned backwards, his arm slung across the back of the front seat looking at him. He gives him a nod as Booker looks at him. Andy is beside him, in her usual driver’s position and he meets her eyes in the mirror. Booker doesn’t think he’s ever in his life felt more tired than in that moment, like a cloth all wrung out of water but continuously squeezed for more.   
“Don’t look so surprised Basti. We know what you did with that van. We figured it out when you slammed it into those mercs and blasted them all to kingdom come. You saved us. The least we could do is go pick up you girlfriend and your animals,” Joe explains and Booker feels tears gather at the corners of his eyes. It’s not forgiveness, but it's something that feels like the right direction. He nods, smiling slightly at them all in thanks.  
“You can give us the address Book and then sleep. You look like shit,” Andy speaks for the first time and Booker nearly cries for hearing her voice. He relays the address and then pulls the blanket up higher around himself.   
He sleeps through nearly the entire drive, waking only as they hit the gravel driveway leading to the farm. He doesn't know how the next few moments will go but he can only hope the team will hear them out.


	12. Je Suis Calme Depuis Si Longtemps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've Been Quiet for so Long  
> -Silence by Marshmellow ft Khalid

Chapter Twelve

Nicky gently gostles Booker awake as they get to the driveway. It takes him a moment to remember where he is and get his bearings but the first thing he notices is a distinct lack of pain. He is exceptionally glad to find the heat in his chest is gone, though his muscles ache as if from strain. It’s a weird feeling but Booker will take the ache over the pain anyday.   
The driveway is long and bumpy, so Booker suffers through about five minutes of incredible, mind numbing anxiety. He worries his lip absentmindedly, opening it up to bleed before it closes again three or four times. He internally debates the merits of whether telling them about Quynh ahead of time is what’s best or if he should just let them see for themselves. Nicky is giving him sidelong looks and Booker can tell that his anxiety is wearing onto the other man. Nile must also notice the tension but she instead fills the silence with innocuous chatter with Joe up in the front. Booker couldn’t honestly say what they were talkinging about. He feels a little bit like the kids in Charlie Brown, the adults in the room sounding like droning trumpets. Before he can make up his mind about what to say they’re parking and everyone is climbing out of the van leaving him hesitating in the back.   
It’s well into the night at this point. There’s a full moon in the sky so the area is well lit. The trees silhouetted behind a small indistinct cabin, with smoke curling lazily out of the chimney and light pouring from the kitchen window. It looks cozy and Booker is filled with a sense of loss knowing that they’ll be leaving soon.   
Nile stands at the open the van door and holds out a hand for him when he hesitates. He clenches and unclenches his fists a couple of times, before taking her offered hand and allowing her to pull him through the open door. The fresh air has a crisp chill and Booker takes a moment to feel it. The team stands around him, tense but not openly hostile. They can tell he’s nervous and they don’t quite know how to react to it yet. Even Joe who typically quips when he’s nervous reads the room and decides to keep quiet. Booker resists the urge to run into the woods and instead leads them all forward towards the homey structure. He peeks at the barn and from what he can tell at this distance, it appears unharassed. He rubs his hands on his jeans as he takes the two steps up the porch and he stops in front of the door. He hesitates again, hand halfway extended before turning back to the group behind him.   
“I know this is going to be hard but just, please, hear us out first alright,” Booker regrets the words immediately as Nicky now has his hand on his holster and Andy has narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Well too late now’ he thinks to himself and turns from them.  
Booker rubs his hands on his jeans once again, takes a deep breath in, before opening the front door and proceeding into the interior. 

Quynh is sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of tea and a cup laid out in front of her. She stands as Booker enters the room and everyone finally gets a good look at ‘Jenny’. The team stands stunned still in the open doorway for long seconds. Booker makes his way around the kitchen and leans himself up against the wall near the living room, chewing anxiously on his fingers.   
The tension in the room is a living oppressive thing. He’s placed himself so that if Quynh or anyone from the team makes any aggressive move forward he would be able to get to Quynh before anyone would make it around or across the table. This vantage also gives him an unimpeded view of both parties. The two sides stare at each other and not one of them makes a noise. Nile has her hands up on her face like she’d gasped and tried to shove it back down. Joe’s stiff as a statue, jaw clenched and eyebrows furrowed. Nicky still has his hand on his holster but it’s limp and he fully has his mouth open in surprise. Were he closer and this was a year ago Booker, would make a joke about catching flies. Andy and Quynh meanwhile both look like blank slates, neither moving nor emoting anything visibly.   
“Wha-what the fuck Booker!” It’s Nile who breaks the silence and suddenly all eyes are on him. Nile looks incredulous and she giggles a little hysterically before slamming her mouth closed with a snap. Booker shrugs helplessly at the question, too nervous to try to talk it out right now. His mind is a clusterfuck of too loud and nothing of substance at the moment. He feels like a broken record but he’s just so tired. He’s been planning for this moment for a long time now but he doesn’t remember a single word of any of his rehearsed speeches.   
“It’s not his fault. I made him keep me a secret,” Quynh sounds like she’s been gargling sand, her voice is shaky and rough. At the sound of her voice the attention in the room shifts back to her and she stands resolutely in the face of the scrutiny. Booker can see her hands shake as she clasps them behind her back but she stands tall and resolute. He suddenly feels overwhelmingly proud and protective. For all that Quynh has done to him, they’ve come to a place of understanding between them. He doesn’t trust her but with sudden realization, he knows he loves her. They both know this isn’t ideal, maybe they had done this too quick, maybe neither of them are ready for this reunion but it’s happened and there’s no going back now.   
“How? When?” Nicky asks gently, finally gathering his jaw up from the floor. Quynh swallows hard again and answers, “The box rusted enough for me to break out about the same time Andy lost her immortality.”   
“Why didn’t you come to us? Why did you go to Booker?” Joe inquires and it’s imistable hurt in his voice as he does. Booker tries not to read into the question, tries not to hear the ‘why go to the traitor’ in the unspoken words between the lines.   
Quynh’s hands clench tightly behind her back but she remains visibly unaffected to the group. “Many reasons. I was angry. I was scared. I wasn’t ready. Booker was alone like I was. We aren’t meant to be alone.” With the last pointed pronouncement Joe imperceptibly flinches. The tension hangs in the air and Booker fears which direction this interaction could go. He doesn’t want this to turn violent, he doesn’t want this to become a blame game. He definitely doesn’t want to tackle the looming beast that is his first few weeks with Quynh with the team right now.   
“Alright, we know you guys must have questions but I regret that this isn’t the greatest time for them. You all deserve the truth and we’re willing to tell it to you but we do need to pack up and go. This is a compromised location and we need to move,” Booker shifts off the wall taking a step closer to Quynh, hopefully changing the subject. 

It’s Andy who makes the first move after him. She’s been silent since the moment she came into the room, her eyes never leaving Quynh. She stutters into motion, moving quickly across the room. Booker almost moves to intercept but he stops when he sees the tears. Two lines slide silently down her cheeks as she throws both arms around Quynh, speaking in a language Booker is sure none of them but the two of them know. Quynh looks tense at first, but before long she melts into Andy’s arms, holding her tightly.   
At her movement the spell seems to wear off. The people across the room shift, blinking almost as if waking up. They come fully into the room, closing the door behind them. Nicky’s hands are down by his side now and he’s shooting Booker looks of incredulity. Joe is just staring at Andy and Quynh. Nile gives him a side eye and then asks, “Does this mean you’ve been sleeping with Quynh?”   
Booker nearly spit-takes, despite not having a drink in his mouth. The boys are staring at him like he’s just kicked a baby. Even Andy pulls slightly from Quynh to stare at him and Booker suddenly, desperately wishes he were drunk.  
“No Nile, I have not been sleeping with Quynh. Jesus Christ,” Booker rolls his eyes and throws his hands up when he says this and Joe suddenly, and somewhat desperately, starts laughing. He’s across the room too suddenly and he picks Quynh up, like he has with Andy, and swings her around. Booker is afraid of how Quynh will react to the sudden movements and the touching but she giggles and holds on. Nicky comes up beside him then, eyes shiny as he takes Quynh in his arms and holds her tight. Booker feels his throat tighten and he distracts himself by looking around the cabin. He’s surprised to see that Quynh hasn’t packed anything away that he can see. The paintings are all still hung on the walls. The living room windows have plastic sheeting stapled in place of the windows but the glass fragments have been cleared away. Sitting back on the mantelpiece is the picture from Joe and Nile, sans the glass in the front of the frame. The knife from Andy is back in it’s spot between the picture and the various Spice Chick hats and accessories from Nicky. It looks mostly just like before he'd been taken.   
He notices then that Nile is still at the door, but has positioned herself where she can see the view out the window and the entrances to the room, making sure to watch the entries and exits while the rest of them are distracted. Booker’s insanely thankful to have her suddenly.   
He hates to break up the moment but he knows they need to leave. The oppressive shadow of Dr. Kozak sitting heavily on his shoulders. He steps closer to his friends and reminds them gently of the urgency. Andy is staring at Quynh, barely taking her eyes away but she agrees with him. Nicky and Joe offer to go out and hitch up the horse trailer to their truck and to get the animals settled while the rest of them pack up the house.   
Andy stays at Quynh’s side as they pack and Booker makes sure to be within eye shot the entire time. Quynh seems to be stable enough. She’s making the same googoo eyes at Andy as Andy is at her but Booker’s not going to fuck around with Andy’s mortatlity.   
He’s distracted by this self appointed duty when he hears the lock click of the basement door. He turns and sees Nile pull open the door and flick on the light. He moves quickly towards her, grabbing her arm as she takes the first step down into the room below. She looks at him in shock and looks a tad bit like she’ll punch him if he doesn't explain himself soon. Booker pulls her gently back up the stairs before letting her go and putting his hands up in apology.   
“I’ll pack the basement, if you could watch those two for a few minutes for me,” Booker says trying for nonchalant but the knowing look that Nile gives him lets him know she’s not buying it. She looks like she’s calculating for a minute, weighing whether this is a battle she wants to have or not but eventually she rolls her eyes and makes a go ahead motion with her hand. Booker smiles a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and waits till Nile moves away before turning back towards the basement. The chair is still bolted in the centre and suspicious stains have soaked into the concrete and had refused to be cleaned no matter how often Booker had scrubbed. The room smells like gun oil, bleach, and pennies. He deliberately shutters the part of his brain that wants to get stuck on the memories in this place and goes down into the basement on his own. He steps past the blood stains and over the collar laying out on the floor and heads to the two trunks at the far wall. He checks the contents, making sure that all their weapons are accounted for and packed securely before pulling the two trunks up from the basement. He hauls the trunks into the kitchen with the other boxes before going back to the basement. He can’t help but take one last look, before switching off the light and locking the door again. Nile watches him but doesn’t say anything from her place helping the other two women pack up. Booker feels a little bit silly about his reaction and he’s afraid he was too late to have stopped Nile from seeing from the top of the stairs. He desperately hopes she didn’t see anything in her brief glance down into the basement. He’s feeling a little too raw and vulnerable to share that part of himself with her right now.  
Booker is surprised to see how much he and Quynh have accumulated in their time together. Besides the trunks there are three boxes and two duffles. They leave most things like dishes and such but take the sentimentals and essentials. Booker doesn’t think he’s had this amount of stuff to pack outside of one of their storage locations in a long time.   
Nicky and Joe eventually come in to help them lug the boxes and trunks to the van. Once it’s all packed up Booker stands in his empty living room and takes in the barren cabin. He’s going to miss this place. It had been a place of torture at first but had come to mean so much more in the last months. It’d become home in a way that no other place had since his own with his family all those years ago. It’s been a place where he’d slowly started to rebuild himself. He isn’t sure what the future holds for him but this place had offered rest and peace in a time he didn’t think he’d ever feel peace again.   
He’s brought out of his thoughts by Quynh appearing at his elbow. He’s about to greet her when she wraps her arms around his waist. His teeth click audibully he shuts his mouth so fast. He stands, stiff and unsure before patting her awkwardly on the back. Quynh’s never really been one for physical affection before. He doesn’t really know how to react with the suddenness of it.  
“I’m glad you’re okay Booker,” Quynh says into his chest and he finally loosens enough to return the hug. He can’t imagine what the last couple of days must have been like for her. He can only imagine the panic at finding him gone and then her bravery to call the team. He’s grateful for her quick thinking.  
They stand together for a few seconds longer looking around at their near empty house before they leave it, locked and dark behind them. Booker checks in on the animals in the horse trailer making sure they are settled for the journey before jumping into the truck. He half expects Quynh to join him in the truck but is surprised to find Joe already in the driver's seat. Booker hesitates for half a second, not sure if he’s welcome but seeing Nicky and the rest already getting into the van ahead of them he gets in the cab next to Joe. Without further fuss the team pulls out and starts the long drive out to Marseilles. 

The drive is silent for the first while, Joe concentrating on the winding backroads. Booker wants to rest but feels far too tightly wound to actually fall asleep. He tries a few times to close his eyes only to have them spring open at any noise. He gives up on the attempt and instead tries to not concentrate on how incredibly awkward he feels. He doesn’t know if Joe expects him to be the first one to talk or if he wants to. He’s not sure he and Joe have ever been this quiet for this long when there wasn’t a mission that required it.   
Eventually Joe clears his throat and Booker startles slightly at the sudden noise. He’s given a quick side eye and Joe purses his lips in quick apology for the disturbance before he sighs deeply.   
“You feeling alright? No more pain?” Joe asks. Booker shuffles slightly in his seat, evaluating.   
“I’m tired and sore but no, no more pain.”  
“Alhamdulillah,” Joe says under his breath and Booker can’t help but echo the sentiment. Joe wipes at his face and gives Booker another sidelong glance.  
“I’m still angry you know.”  
“Yeah, I didn’t expect less. You deserve to be,” Booker sighs. He wasn’t hoping for different but it still feels somewhat disappointing.   
“It sucked to be stuck like that you know. It was everything we’ve been dreading for centuries. I don’t like feeling helpless, especially where Nicolo’s safety is concerned. I’m not a fan of losing control of a situation but I never thought for a moment that you weren’t coming to get us. To learn that it was you who had put us in there... it felt like I was forced to reconceptualize reality. I had to re-evaluated the past 200 years with you. It hurt, alot. It took me a while to realize why I was so upset, you know besides the betrayal thing,” Joe confesses all of this while staring straight ahead, out the windshield. His forehead furrows fitfully. Booker waits, listening silently, though it’s hard to. His gut feels tied up in knots and part of him really wants to jump out the moving truck door but he at least owes Joe his attention.   
“I blamed you obviously but I also blamed myself. I had to reevaluate scenarios, things I suddenly regretted, things I wished I had said or done. Wondering how I could have been a better teammate, a better friend. If only I had done this or said that. When we first found you, you were so lost. You needed us in a way that I didn’t think I needed you. I took you for granted. You were always there for us in a way that I don’t think I really knew until you weren’t at our side anymore. I was left wondering in what ways I had failed you, in what ways I hadn’t been enough. Instead of taking time with my feelings and sorting it out I shut you out instead. I’m sorry Basti,” Joe looks at him then with a quick glance clearing his throat as he speaks before meeting his eyes. Booker feels the words as an icy blast straight through his chest. At first he can barely comprehend them. He wants to stop Joe. It feels so wrong for Joe to be the one apologizing. He doesn’t have anything to apologize for and it’s painful to hear him but he can’t quite get his brain into gear enough to find the words, so he continues to listen.  
“Right near the beginning of our relationship, Nicolo told me he wanted to be a good man because that was what he thought I was. And for centuries now I have only ever wanted to be a good man because that was how the man I loved saw me. But suddenly I was faced with the reality that I’m not always a good man. I make selfish decisions, I act rashly at times, and I try to control outcomes and people in a way that I can convince myself is best for them. I tried that with you and you were hurt because of it. The banishment was rash and it was cruel. I bottled everything I was feeling up after the lab. I shut you out. I insisted on the banishment because I wanted to punish you, to keep you away from Andy and to make you dependent on me again. I wanted you to be lonely enough to not ever try to leave us again and I’m so sorry that my actions caused you to be in such a vulnerable position. You were left open to be subjected to so much pain, alone not knowing if anyone was coming for you and believing that you deserved it. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most.   
You fucked up, big, we all know that but as Nicky reminded me time and again, you’ve also been there for us in a million different ways the past 200 years. Times you’ve suffered to cover our retreat, the hundreds of times you pulled us out of battle, or all the times you’ve placed your safety and comfort second to aid the team, to aid me. There’s a million different moments of kindness and care that I never noticed until you weren’t there to offer them anymore. You’ve taken more bullets for us than you’ve shot at us. I’m still angry. I think I will be for a while but Booker, I forgive you. I know it was a mistake and I know you didn’t mean it to go that way. I dearly hope that you can forgive me as well.” Booker remained silent as he absorbed what Joe had said, a deep ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the drug. He swallowed twice before he was able to speak.  
“As far as my decision to betray the team, while I appreciate your introspection, it wasn’t about you. I know that sounds self centered but it’s the truth. I had my reasons, my justifications, but at the end of the day it was a decision I made because of the pain I was in. I hated my life and I took it and all of you for granted. We’ll never know if there was anything you could have done to have changed the outcome but I know you gave me plenty of chances to have made a different decision and I didn’t. As for the banishment, of course I forgive you. I never blamed you. It was hard but I only had myself to blame for the choices that I had made. You are a good man Joe. You have been for every moment that I’ve known you and however we go forward, I want to repay all the kindness that you and the others have offered me. I want to live, for maybe the first time in over 200 years and not just because I have to. I want to live for you, all of you. I missed you all more than I thought possible,” Bookers says a little wetly and if both men take a moment to surreptitiously wipe their eyes, neither of them brings it up.  
After a few moments of silence Joe smiles over at him and reaches out a hand to clasp the back of Booker’s nape, squeezing gently and patting him a couple times before saying, “We could probably spend an age blaming and going back and forth on the whole thing but I’d rather just go forward. The past year has been awful without you, you know. I miss having you around. No one will watch football with me anymore. Nile says it’s too wimpy. She likes real blood sports you know. Makes me watch UFC and all that junk. Nicky is ecstatic to introduce her to Calcio Fiorentino next year. It’s all very uncivilized,” Joe laughs as he makes the confession, his eyes crinkling up in their familiar laugh lines and something finally loosens in Booker’s chest. He didn’t think he would ever be privy to that look again. He returns the smile and feels something like hope warm inside him.  
“You don’t trust Quynh do you?” Joe changes the topic and at Booker’s hesitant look explains, “You never left Andy alone with her. You wouldn’t have done that if you trusted her.”  
“It's not that I don’t trust her. Quynh’s trying. She’s made significant progress the last year, absolutely remarkable but she’s just not quite right yet. She’s got a lot of trauma to unpack and deal with. I just don’t want her to make a decision in a moment where she's not quite herself that she’ll regret later.” Joe nods sagely along, looking thoughtful.

The rest of the drive is spent mostly in quiet conversation but it isn’t as heavy as it was before. Joe catches him up on a few things of the past year. Booker asks a few pointed questions regarding the mercs who had grabbed him. He knows they are going to be a problem still. They come from a deeply embedded and deeply entrenched criminal network that will be difficult to uproot. He plans quietly to himself but keeps his thoughts on the matter to himself for the moment. There will come a time for them to take on this organization before too long but for now, he gets to be right here, on a road trip with his best friend.  
They pull into a ranch in Marseilles by first light the next day. Booker takes Nile to help him settle the animals while the others unpack the truck. Joe gives him a knowing look as he follows Quynh and Andy into the house. The animals seem anxious about the sudden move, but are happy to see Booker. Nile is ecstatic to finally meet the famed Spice Chicks, though at this point they are well and truly chickens. It takes them a bit to settle and feed all the animals.   
“Quynh tortured you in that basement didn’t she?” Nile says out of the blue and Booker nearly drops the bag of feed he was using. He spins around to see Nile standing a few feet away, petting Chi but watching him carefully.   
He could lie but he knows that she saw the state of the basement. Saw the bloodstains and the collar. He knows this is going to be a big deal to Nile but he’s sure it’ll be much worse if he lies.   
“For a bit. She stopped before too long. It wasn’t personal. You felt her in that box. She was crazy. She was seriously messed up by the experience,” Booker confirms and Nile looks suddenly like she’s going to be sick. She looks away from him and concentrates on Chi, who luxuriates under the attention oblivious to the sudden tension. Nile swallows hard, twice before she nods and stands up. She walks towards him and stops a few feet shy of touching distance.   
“You never stopped dreaming about her did you? You dreamed about her for two hundred years. I only had the dreams three or four times and I thought I was going to go crazy with her. How did you survive that?”  
“I almost didn’t,” Booker reminds her gently. She nods sagely before asking, “Is she a danger to Andy or the rest of us?”  
“Possibly. I know she doesn’t want to be but she loses herself sometimes. We’ll have to watch her. We’ll teach you all her triggers and what to do when she loses it but I wouldn’t have brought her along if I thought she would kill us all in our sleep. She doesn’t want revenge any more. She wants to live out the last of whatever time Andy has left with her.” Nile nods again, looking pensive. She’s shifting from foot to foot in a way that shows her nervousness.   
“You seem different than the last time I saw you. You’re still… somber but you look focused in a way you weren't before. If you’re ready now, I’ll advocate for your full reinstatement. They’ll listen to me this time, I’ve got those guys wrapped around my finger. You don’t need to decide now, just think about what you want okay?” Nile says with a smile as she reaches out and squeezes Booker’s arm before leading the way back to the main ranch house. Booker starts to follow behind before he is interrupted by an insistent squeal behind him. He smiles gently before picking up Bian, who is a lot heavier than he remembers, and continues after Nile. 

The rest of the team has gathered around the dining table waiting for them to arrive. The ranch was somewhat derelict, though not shabby by any means. No one had lived here in over 20 years but they had hired some caretakers to come look after the place every couple of weeks, like they did with most of their safehouses. They would have to clean and dust more thoroughly tomorrow but for now the kitchen was set.   
Nicky had prepared Chicken Carbonara while everyone else had prepared the rooms. Joe dutifully watched as Andy and Quynh sat at the table together talking in that long dead language. They hadn’t unpacked much, they would probably be leaving again before too long, especially after Booker revealed the source of his kidnapping. Nicky had found some wine and candles in one of the cabinets and the atmosphere was warm and homey when he and Nile came in the front door. Booker set Bian down after closing the door. Andy looked like she was about to comment but stayed silent at the look of joy Quynh gave the pig. Quynh reached down and pet the pig behind her ears, cooing to her before Bian eventually curled up beneath Qyunh’s chair.   
The team sat together while Nicky served out the food, a long familiar ritual. They ate and while it started with mostly stilted conversation, eventually things mellowed out enough for the atmosphere to become more relaxed. They avoided the big topics and kept things light and unimportant.   
It was surreal being at this table with these people. Booker never imagined he would sit with Andy ever again and had lost hope of ever seeing the reunion between Quynh and the team, yet here he was. He knew the conversation to come was going to be hard. It would inevitably remind them all of the continued consequence of his betrayal and the very real and terrifying threat that was Dr. Kozak but looking around at the people around him, seeing the bond between them, he glimpsed for the first time the depth of what Quynh had told him she’d seen. He saw the love there and for the first time since Jean-Pierre, he didn’t hide from it. He was not a lucky man, but here in this moment he felt blessed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah! Finally finished! So sorry for the wait for those of you who are used to me updating within a couple of days. This story really wanted to go in two different directions at the end and it took me a long time to figure out which was best for the arc and for the characters. I ended up going with the happier of the two which I am happy about but maybe one day I'll explore the darker direction. There are some loose threads in this narrative that I will be tying into the next fic in the series but I'm going to take my time with that one. I'll be going with either Nile or Quynh's POV for the next one. I need a bit of a break to make sure I do it well and not just to get it out. Thank you so much for all of the encouragement and the reviews!!! A big shout out for those of you who were with me from the beginning and throughout the fic. It kept me going. Any thoughts you have for any followups or side stories let me know! Peace


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